NGC2547 - An Open Cluster in Vela
Another clear night, and another chance to take the rig out and capture more photons.
I haven’t been having much luck with imaging nebulae lately, so I thought I’d have a shot at another open star cluster. They’re (relatively) easy to image, and provide good practise in removing a lot of background noise and gunk from the images.
To cut a long story (mostly) short, the night started out with the usual hassles of getting the telescope focussed and then getting the imaging under way after deciding the best exposure time. (By keeping the gain, offset and temperature the same I can concentrate on fiddling with the exposure for the best images. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.)
I was going to try for a full 2 hours worth of data, but a screw-up on my part saw a good number of subframes thrown away because KStars didn’t send the target name across to Ekos, causing the file names to be all wrong. I could have (and should have) kept them but tossed them out. The stacking software does not care what the filenames are, so next time I’ll be less wasteful.
I think the UV/IR cut filter is causing some ‘blooming’ around the brighter stars, so I’ll leave it out of the imaging train next time I do a cluster, and see if that makes a difference.
I also really, really need to start taking flats and darkflats. This image had some noticeable vignetting in the corners and I had to crop it reasonably hard to get rid of it.
Image details:
- Gain: 100
- Offset: 10
- Temperature: 0 degrees C
- Exposure: 15 seconds
- Filter: UV/IR Cut
- Lights: 240
- Darks: 25
- Flats: 0
- Dark Flats (Bias): 0
- Stacked and pre-proc’d in SiriL, finished in Affinity Photo
