Hals

I foolishly tried to image the Wizard Nebula during the recent 94% full Moon, DSLR even with a Quad band filter the result lots and lots of noise, likely caused by over-processing too. Plus I was a tad out of focus...It's a learning curve for sure, but a fun one.

RIP. A legend.

Excellent ! Much better cheers !

IC 1396 Elephants Trunk Nebula. 24 x 180 sec subs, with calibration frames. WO Star 71, Canon 80D with Altair Quadband filter. Poor seeing and warm temperature but it has been the only clear couple of hours I've manged to catch so far this month !

Superb 👍

Beautiful star colours and the dark nebulosity in the background gives it a magical almost 3D look. Very well done.

This 👍

Never ceases to amaze me what can be captured from your own back garden, today's images rival and surpass the images from the "great observatories" that I grew up looking at. Just think what will be do-able in another twenty years. Truly wonderful.

Both are excellent bits of kit. The Samyang will give a wider view at 135mm to the Redcat's 250mm. As far as I can see that's all that's in it, personal preference.

Nice one Stuart. Funny thing is I've noticed this effect but only during one imaging session. I've had many since with no changes to the equipment barring slight focus changes and my stars have been all ok, displaying no artifacts.

You need something like this...

Restacked and it's definitely the K-S clipping that's caused it. I used Average this time and it's much better and wow, that is one fast moving comet. Even taking 30 x 4 second shots the movement it showed in this short time has really surprised me. Thanks again Kyle Allen for pointing me in the right direction. 👍

Cheers Kyle, I believe I did use K-S. I will restack and see what happens !

Mods, I've posted this in the wrong place, could you please move to the Imaging - Widefield and Special Events & Comets section ! Thanks.

Definitely need a filter for this one. This an un-filtered two and a quarter hours of integration time. 45 x 180 sec subs with calibration frames. Very noisy trying to pull any real detail out of it.

Imaged our transient friend last night and the coma shows a strange artifact. Obviously something with my scope but really annoying. I can process it out but it's got me stumped. Second pic is a crop of the autosave.tif after stacking, pre-processing.

Fantastic work. I'd be extremely happy if that were mine.

Lovely. The Samyang 135mm f2 is a wonderful lens, I haven't seen one bad pic from anybody who uses it.

Stunning !!

There isn't a "one rig does it all" but I'd echo what everyone else said about the mount. It's paramount (no pun intended...)

Bortle 6 officially, but I'd say closer to 5 in reality as I can see the Milky Way once dark adapted.

I was imaging last night, only managed an hour on the Cocoon Nebula. What caught my eye was the artifacts showing on the stars. The thing is this hasn't showed up before. Up to now my star images were circular. The only thing that I have done since my last imaging session is cleaned my objective lens (carefully...blower brush, lens tissue\fluid then a very gentle polish with a microfibre cloth). I'm very careful handling the scope, no knocks etc. If this is aperture vignetting how can this suddenly appear, and if it's pinched optics the same question as nothing has changed barring the lens clean. Here's an image to show the effect - the little notch at the eight o'clock position on the brighter stars (low rez but you can see it). Hope anyone can shed some light on it and hopefully a fix !

That is top drawer. Very well done 👍

Unmodded DSLR with no filters, 24 x180 sec subs, plus the usual calibration frames. I'm not getting hung up about too many stars on this as I like to see it as is, if you will. I'm just so happy that I'm finally able to capture these beautiful objects after many years as a purely visual observer.

Nice one, lovely colour in the Dumbbell 👍