M8 The Lagoon Nebula (Anthony (Tony) Johnson)

M8 The Lagoon Nebula

Finally got my Lagoon Nebula shot before its gone for the summer, weather has been so crappy I was thinking I was gonna loose my opportunity to get enough subs before it would set. Skies finally cleared and I was able to get almost 3hrs of data before it got too low to be of any more use to still shoot. Shot from my bortle class 6 sky. Camera used was an unmodified Canon 60D. Scope was my Skywatcher Evolux 82ED APO. No field flattener, reducer. Just plain scope and camera piggybacked on my LX200 12" for tracking purposes. Shot until M8 reached about 18degs above the horizon and thought any more will just get into too much turbulence in the atmosphere. This resulted in 337 30sec light frames. Used a technique that I"ve read about in taking my flats. I was using the method where you use the same ISO as your lights and then just shoot whatever shutter speed gives you a 50% histogram. Had a lengthy conversation here on astrobin about taking flats to reduce some of my fixed pattern noise and was told, and which lined up with a website I had looked at a few months ago, that you should find out what the value is looking at the statistics of the mean and medium results a flat frame in pixinsight of a fully saturated image is, then take half of that measurement and shoot your flats accordingly at 1sec shutter speed. Truly there seems to be no consistence on how to shoot flats, there are at least 2 camps that I've seen, but in using this method my sky background seems to be more noise free of this banding that can occur in my Canon 60d, and some of the dust bunnies that weren't getting calibrated out seem to be gone. At least this is what I've seen and this image is a testament to shooting my flats that way.

The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
Unmodified DSLR Deep Sky
Image the Universe
Deep Sky Northern Hemisphere

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8266618
PixInsight job	IMZ4AYKSUZUT7RST37KZS1DTQ36YDDHA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	18h04m09s.86
RA (top/left)	18h08m24s.87
RA (top/right)	17h59m32s.99
RA (bottom/right)	17h59m51s.99
RA (bottom/left)	18h08m49s.62

Dec (center)	-24°20′14″.3
Dec (top/left)	-23°35′43″.8
Dec (top/right)	-23°43′12″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	-25°04′25″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	-24°56′57″.7

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