NGC 281 - Pacman Nebula

[Brent]

After almost 15 weeks since my last session I gave in to the withdrawal symptoms and set up my gear on Thursday night despite the heavy moonlight. I usually wait until the end of August to get going again but, well, when the dark side calls

Not much detail going on here which I think, (hope!) may be mostly down to flexure - over 3 hours 30 minutes of subs, DSS shows dX movement backwards and forwards of 8 pixels and dY of 13 pixels! At least PA looked better, with the Angle column showing a field rotation over the same period of 0.16 of a degree.

Anyway, set up went surprisingly smoothly after almost four months. Whilst tearing down though I removed the camera which I usually leave on the scope to take flats the next day - doh! So, no calibration frames in this - I just made an artificial flat and used weak hot pixel removal in DSS for the lack of darks. I still don't have a coma corrector so even with this crop the edge stars look rubbish.

This is 31x300s @ ISO400 with the kit in my sig.

[xtreemchaos]

thats a great image mate,nice colour and detail,well framed.thanks for posting. charl.

[Brent]

Thanks charl.

I think I've had a bit of a breakthrough. Looking at others' modded DSLR results I knew something wasn't right, so did some research.

It turns out I had the white balance settings in DSS all wrong - this I had suspected but couldn't find them to change them until now!

Anyway, I've done a complete re-stack and re-process. The processing flow was pretty much the same but I had a much better stack to work with.

I'm pretty happy with the result - there's MUCH more colour range. I just need to get more subs now to try to get deeper.

Oh, and go back and re-stack/re-process my last 3 deep sky images