First Stacked Milky Way

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Two clear nights out of three since I bought my mount, that must be unprecedented in the history of UK amateur astronomy. This was my first time using the EQ3-2 in anger. I decided to use an old Carl-Zeiss 35mm M42 lens as the focus ring is nice and stiff and actually stays where I put it. I plonked it down and sighted on Polaris through the mount (no polar scope yet), turned on the motor and took a couple test exposures to make sure it was tracking OK. I couldn't see any trailing in a 2 minute sub so I pointed my camera towards Cygnus.

(20x2 minute subs at ISO 800, 8 darks, 20 dark bias, no flats. 35mm f2.4 lens stopped down to about f3.5.)

That's Deneb lower-bottom and Vega at top-right. I've picked up some red from the North America Nebula below Deneb but have unfortunately chopped off Mexico - I was having trouble with the ball head joint, it's OK with my 50mm lens but really doesn't like the weight of the 35mm, I have a more sturdy one I can replace it with if I can find the right bolt. There are also some hints of the Sadr Region.

I'm delighted with the result. I've taken a few single exposures of the Milky Way before but I really wanted one where it jumps off the screen. I'm going to have a lot of fun with this mount and trusty 1100D.

Any suggestions for improvement would be welcome. I only did a quick process in DSS, I stacked and stretched the curves a little, then boosted the saturation. Could there be any more nebulosity hiding in there?

There is a little coma apparent towards the edges but it's not bad. There is also a strange reflection artifact coming off Vega. The star shapes look good, I guess my polar alignment must have been fairly decent.

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Made a typo there, that should be 10x2 minute subs, 20 minutes total integration time.

[Adamar98]

Looks good to me. It's a nice image.

Like you said, get the framing right and stop the lens down a bit more. Only thing I would suggest is more subs.

I think you'll get more of the nebula through.

[Pete Presland]

that has come out pretty well, some of the brighter stars do look like they have some sort of diffraction spikes on them.

[Alien 13]

Nice image, its good to see you have the EQ3-2 up and running as said more subs and longer exposures will bring out more detail.

The diffraction spikes on the bright stars can be removed by using an aperature mask on the lens instead of the internal iris .

Alan

[bruno]

nice image, the only thing that stacks around here are the clouds

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Thanks everyone, the tips and encouragement I've received here over the last few months have really helped to get me up and running.

Like you said, get the framing right and stop the lens down a bit more.

Yes, I should probably try that lens at f4 next time.

The diffraction spikes on the bright stars can be removed by using an aperature mask on the lens instead of the internal iris .

Nice tip, but I actually quite like those diffraction spikes. Stars were always pointy when I was growing up. They are a big improvement on the star bloat I was getting previously, stopping down has fixed that.

Went out again last night to try some more test shots using the 50mm with its fancy new mod - a rubber band over the focus ring to prevent it from slipping. Was a bit of an experiment to see how much Moon and twilight my setup can cope with and to test out my tracking and aperture settings. Before I went out I used a program to check the position of Polaris relative to true north and set up my mount accordingly. I'm not sure if it really helped as I was just doing it by eye by sighting through the mount, but 2 min subs at 50mm were fine, while at 4 min trailing was obvious.

Here's a couple images from last night, 50mm at f3.5:

(Cygnus, 10x2 minutes at ISO 400, 20 dark bias, no darks or flats.)

A solitary cloud interrupted my Cygnus run so I aimed left a bit.

(Deneb at right of frame, 10x2 minutes at ISO 400, 20 dark bias, no darks or flats.)

I did take darks but the duration was off as my camera was in the wrong timer mode after taking the dark bias frames. I had another go but the camera battery then went dead.

All very encouraging. The 50mm is looking good at f3.5, I'm getting reasonable length subs and I learned I can get decent results under a bright sky (even at 2 minutes and ISO 400 my subs were light blue, the peak 2/3rds across the histogram). I need to look more into the processing side next, I suspect a gradient removal tool would help a lot with the above.

Hopefully by the time the skies darken I'll be ready for some longer imaging runs.