Orion

Excellent work, if this was captured with the skymax 102 on a non eq mount this is top work,

Regards

Ben

Thanks for comments, I am really happy with the results. For the full background:

Indeed captured with the Skymax 102, synscan goto Alt Az without any special tricks nor focal reducer or so (Canon EOS1100D at prime focus, using EOS utility). Also pictured taken south-south west which is not best -for comparison I manage 25 sec on pleiades more West-.

15 sec subs exposure was acceptable with about 70% of the pictures usable (and when unusable, typically little vibration of the mount I believe which means the mount is more the limiting factor than the scope itself). Stack in Nebulosity (Deep sky stacker does not accept much of the picturse as I understand it is very sensitive to the shape of the stars, and reject most of them, but above shows still giving a pretty good result when using Nebulosity -selecting alignement points manually). I am thinking to continue adding more data (above was taken during 2 sessions, for a total of 16 minutes). Key is processing and levelling and Nebulosity does very well the job for most part in FIT format (the DDS function is great!) and I fine tune levelling, curves, color, denoising in GIMP on TIFF files (In gimp I also played on a 2 kind of " exposure blends" for getting the core and the faint areas: from the stack in Nebulosity, I only level the basic stack slightly for the core as 1 picture "low exposure" and levelled as much as I can for a 2sd picture "long exposure" -blowing then the core- and I compose both of them to get a nicer overall homogenous picture -which I think can be better made, I am still learning this method and a lot to be done on mask/blur/curves, above is my 1 st trial this route)...

At the end of the day, more work spent on processing that taking the pictures ;-)

All pictures in my gallery are taken with this Skymax 102 Alt Az goto and DSLR (included planets), I am quite amazed by what this little scope and a basic DSLR can do !!! (I am only starting amator astronomy and get that 1st scope 2,5 month ago). Note that I have the chance to live in almost a non light polluted area, I guess that helps.

Looks like your a natural at astrophotograpy, i look forward to seeing your progression and what you can acheive with your setup.

Regards

Ben