M33 Triangulum Galaxy (luminance only)

Clouds and fog prevented me from obtaining the colour for this
Still, happy with the luminance stack. This target is very low in our sky and it probably will have to wait until next year for me to add the RGB data.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com/​photos/troypiggo/78187​55558/

very nice for a difficult target

I agree a very nice even in luminance .

very nice capture

this luminance is great. Once you get the RGB its going to look awesome. This is a difficult target.

Thanks guys. Was very happy with the star tightness and roundness in this image, right to the corners. Can't recommend enough how important it is to spend plenty of time getting accurately polar aligned. I rushed my drift alignment on the first night, and was getting rotation in the corners. The night I took this I spent another half hour to hour drift aligning again, and the results show.

troypiggo wrote in post #14883413
Thanks guys. Was very happy with the star tightness and roundness in this image, right to the corners. Can't recommend enough how important it is to spend plenty of time getting accurately polar aligned. I rushed my drift alignment on the first night, and was getting rotation in the corners. The night I took this I spent another half hour to hour drift aligning again, and the results show.

I'm a little rusty but use to i would do manual PA and it would take 15-20 mins but right now 45 mins - 1 hr . Only thing is i also manually guided and that was hard to keep a star in the little box of a IR EP . Never had perfect round stars but close a couple times . My mount is the old CG-5 german EQ .

I have no idea how I'd be able to do guiding manually - I have neither the patience nor the skill. I use an EQ6 mount and autoguide through Maxim.

The way I've been drift aligning is to start guiding, turn off DEC guiding, and watch the graph of error plots in the DEC axis. Point low in horizon to east or west and adjust the alt screws on mount until the error graph is flat; point scope straight up, turn start guiding with DEC off and adjust the az screws until graph flat. Repeat until graph flat for, say, couple of minutes. Using guiding graph takes advantage of the guiding software's sub-pixel accuracy, so you can pick up the errors very quickly. It can also be done using PHD in a similar fashion.

beautiful