M13 The Great Globular Cluster - Lacking Colour
Sometimes things don't quite work out as expected. My latest image - M13 The Great Cluster in the constellation Hercules - is the first image I have taken for a while and the first taken using an Off Axis Guider instead of a guide scope. This should have been enough to warn against making too many changes, but I also decided to try out the latest version of Nebulosity 3. I used to use Nebulosity 3 as my camera control software with my Canon EOS, but when I upgraded to the QHY8L CCD it wasn't compatible so I started using EZCap - the software that comes bundled with QHY CCD cameras. However, the newest version of Nebulosity now supports the QHY8L so I thought I'd give it a go and I actually got on really well with it - until it came to processing. I'm not sure what went wrong, but my images seem to lack colour. There is a hint of it in there, but not enough to show the amazing blue and red stars in this beautiful cluster.
The image was captured using my QHY8L camera attached to a Sky-Watcher Explorer 190MN Pro, guided using an Off Axis Guider and Starlight Xpress Lodestar guide camera. It is the result of 10 x 180s images, captured and stacked in Nebulosity 3 and processed in Photoshop CS6. I believe that Nebulosity may have automatically debayered the image prior to saving it to disk - obviously the settings must have been wrong. Whilst it is a lovely image, showing lots of detail in the cluster, I can't wait to try again. Next time I will do a sample run with Nebulosity to see if I can get it working, otherwise I will have to revert to EZCap.
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| M13 - The Great Cluster |
The image was captured using my QHY8L camera attached to a Sky-Watcher Explorer 190MN Pro, guided using an Off Axis Guider and Starlight Xpress Lodestar guide camera. It is the result of 10 x 180s images, captured and stacked in Nebulosity 3 and processed in Photoshop CS6. I believe that Nebulosity may have automatically debayered the image prior to saving it to disk - obviously the settings must have been wrong. Whilst it is a lovely image, showing lots of detail in the cluster, I can't wait to try again. Next time I will do a sample run with Nebulosity to see if I can get it working, otherwise I will have to revert to EZCap.
