MarsG76

What a great write up about a fantastic dark sky.... I can only dream of a sky like that...

adding to the above.. I recommend that you exhaust the D40 before retiring it... you might want to start autoguiding before you give up on it.... make sure that your mount is sturdy enough.. a poor mount will not allow you to get any quality images no matter what camera you use... If the shutter is vibrating your telescope, that tells me that your mount might be flimsy... you can see if your DSLR has a mirror lockup feature which will help with vibration. With your images being noisy, I assume that you're exposing at max gain, ISO? Once you're tracking/Guiding and exposing some good length of time than you can expose with a smaller ISO, which will take care of most of the noise problem... I'd say that almost everyones first DSO that they're happy with would be the Orion Nebula, nice bright object... and this object can also be a guide to whether you should upgrade (or mod) your DSLR... you can get an amazing image with a unmodded, stock DSLR of the Orion Nebula if your system is working as it should. Once again, take your time, do not rush it.... do not have unrealistic expectations and never give up.. we all started with mediocre images....

Welcome to SGL and to Astronomy.... What I recommend is that you take your time in learning the ropes and don't try to do too much too quickly. This hobby requires the patience of a monk and dedication of a Martial Artist..... I'd say take as much images with the D40 until you truely feel that you have reached the limit with it... before investing money in a dedicated astronomy camera, make sure that you learned the procedure, since a astronomy camera will not be a miracle solution.. yes it can deliver better quality images than a DSLR but a DSLR can deliver some very good images also... I my self being a DSLR astro imager and am very happy with the images I'm getting lately....

The good thing is that there is a trial version, so I might give it a go and see whether its worth investing in.

I take it that it's a old camera..... still quite a good result.. perhaps stack video grabs of less exposure time per frame??? The surface brightness of M27 is Mag 7.4.

I wonder how much improvement it would make over using Nebulosity for stacking with Photoshop and Astra Image 4 for processing...

When you're processing, you want to keep the blackness of space at the RGB level 15-20 / 255 on a 8 bit scale (I use the color pick tool on photoshop to determine what the black level is)... this way the image has good contrast but the blacks (and hence the fainter detail) isn't clipped and lost making the image look like a 4th generation VHS copy..... andlook more realistic... the other thing you nailed was the amount of color saturation.... yours look good and realistic, but a lot of astrophotos are over saturated making them look cartoony or like a drawring/panting and not as photo realistic....

APP??? I'll have a look into it...

Thanks for sharing.. theres something special about seeing a nice and detailed Jupiter in the eyepiece when comparing it to seeing a photo.. the EP makes it feel more real...

Excellent.. the second version, aka 3 hour process, is better with its darker black level (space) and therefore more contrast.....

Fantastic result.. the mosaic stitch is seamless....

Yes, I too am familiar with that phenomenon... it's the side effect of looking at the featured with one eye and seeing it in 2D.. depending on which hemipshere of your brain processes the view will depend whether you can see it as a bulge or indentation. If you train your brain with practice, you will be able to switch that all will.... exactly the same reason for the attached ballerina spinning left or right.... again, with concentration and practice you can change the spin direction at will. http://www.mindmagician.org/dancer.aspx

Look up "ADM adapters", "Losmandy" and "Mogg Adapters"...

Nice report... it's been a while since I was at the eye piece... reports like yours make me miss it even more.. time to make eyepiece time.

Hello and welcome to the SGL.

It's up near zenith thats why I'm sort of disappointing with this result... I should have better seeing but Jupiter isn't gone yet so there is still a chance.

Yeah definitely... My best from last year was considerably more detailed.

Thanks but I know that my 8" SCT can do better.

So many ideas and project to be had and done.... so little time.

Nice report.. I guess mono and bino observing both have their advantages and disadvantages.

Cool experiment.. so basically you blured the original image unsing convolution and brought back the detail using wavelets?

Great idea with processing when rescaled than scaling down to control the noise and potentially making the image look sharper...

That look great.. awesome detail..

ASCOM is still a thing, version 6.5... Cartes Du ciel is at version 4 and for imaging a guiding I use APT, Astrophotography Tool... PHD 2 for guiding and GPUSB for the connection between the computer and the mount.... computer wise you dont need anything too powerful so you old XP computer will do.

Welcome back to astronomy... take it a step at a time and before you know it, you'll be imaging and processing masterpieces.