AJeazy

1 hour ago, Franklin said:

SW 72ED for a budget option, nice little scope.

Thank you, this actually looks like it will work fairly well.

Hello friends, I am fairly new to astrophotography. I currently use my canon rebel t7 DSLR with a 75-300mm kit lens mounted on a skywatcher 2i pro tracker. I'm looking for hopefully more zoom as the 75-300mm isn't great for a lot of the smaller objects in the sky and it looks like a small telescope to mount on the tracker will be the cheapest way to get more zoom.

The maximum weight for the star tracker is 11 pounds and my DSLR with no lens attached weighs almost exactly 1 pound. I would really just be looking for a scope that's pretty light that I could hook my dslr up to. Any suggestions? 

On 13/12/2022 at 10:30, AstroMuni said:

I have deliberately accentuated the nebulous areas that can be seen in your image, so if you gradually stretch the original image then you should be able to get a lot more detail out that is not stark like what I have done but more soft and natural. You can clearly see the running man nebula too. I used a software called Siril (tutorials are here https://siril.org/tutorials/). Good luck.

 

Hey, Its been a little bit but I redid my image and this is what I came up with. I do like it more and the colors look more correct. 

I used my Canon EOS Rebel T7 with 40 2.5 minute exposures and an ISO of 800.  Used dark, flat, and bias frames and also PixInsight. It was hard to get and cold outside but I was pretty happy with the results and the colors seemed a lot more correct than the Orion Nebula photo I took.  

8 minutes ago, Elp said:

As you can tell it's a night and day difference, an excellent attempt. Is that a single photo or did you stack?

I did 100 photos with 30 second exposures stacked. ISO of 1600. Used Bias, dark, and flat frames as well. 

2 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

Nice shot and a great one for a first attempt. My only suggestion would be to reduce the black point so you can see the cloudy nebula around. What software did you use to process the image?

Thanks for the advice. I used deepskystacker and Gimp and then just tried to follow youtube tutorials on how to use both programs. 

2 hours ago, carastro said:

Presume the 2nd one was done with your tracker.   Why the different field of view?

Always helpful to post up equipment used and length of exposures with images.   
 

Carole

Different camera. 1st was smartphone. 2nd was DSLR. It was a Canon EOS Rebel T7. 

Hey, I'm new here. I love astrophotography but up until tonight, my astrophotography consisted of attaching my smartphone camera to my telescope's eyepiece for 3-5 second exposures. I got a nice bonus this Christmas and spent it on a tracker and this is my first attempt at imaging something using that setup. Of course with the help of some YouTube videos. I've included the one I took with my smartphone for comparison.