Nigel G

Jon, don't worry about the frames with satellites in, DSS removes the satellite trails Its worth having 2 or 3 spare battery's , I use 2 at least on a 4 hour session. Nige.

Ken , I take darks between taking the lights to get full benifit of them, so I'll take 30 light the 10 dark, then 30 light 10 dark and so on to try and capture the camera and outside conditions at different temperatures etc. Thanks for pointing out about stacking darks though, your right. The master dark is subtracted from each frame before being stacked. Nige.

Personally I have London 25 miles to my West, 2 large towns to my South, my bungalow to the north and the dark North sea 5 miles to my east with 1 small village in between. Nige

Jon. I'm with Ken on this, after Friday nights imaging session and a a few other long sessions I end up cropping huge amounts from my images unless I rotate my camera which I don't like to do. Also I keep thinking there's other targets I want to get. By gathering upto 1 hour of data on a target in a night there are many pluses, less rotation, more targets, more chances to change settings and experiment, less chance of getting fed up looking at the same image for hours at a time, and you will see the difference adding more subs does to your image's by processing after each session. There are down sides too, the main one being British weather. Experimenting is quite exciting for me, finding out the unknown, each setup is different an acts differently, the whole Alt-Az imaging subject is unknown, nobody knows the limits, we are searching and experimenting every night we image, since Ken got his cooled CCD I have been gob smacked by his results, taking Alt-Az a big step further forward, all of us are advancing with our techniques in imaging and processing. Your personal kit needs to be tweaked and tuned to each nights imaging, iso settings, exposure times lens or scope choice and so on. So your finding out what you need to know. Now with darks and flats my theory is..... DSS makes a master dark frame from many frames and subtracts it from your light frames. The trouble is each light frame has moved slightly from the last one so the camera noise is not in the same place. Taking loads of darks doesn't seem to be profitable in my mind, to be honest if I use 15 or 50 it doesn't seem to make a difference, others will disagree with me but that's the unknown. Flats too, a master flat is produced by DSS and the effects are removed from the final image, the same thing has happened, your lights have rotated and the lens effects have rotated too, so I use just 12 to 15 flats with same effect that 50 flats has, they are worth taking though. One of my best images was 30 minutes total exposure, I think 10 minutes of dark and a hand full of flats, I have imaged the same target for 3 hours, added 70 darks and had a hell of a job processing the outcome, reducing the lights by 50 % and the darks by about 65 % to get a better result, easier to process and less noise, this is probably due to seeing conditions improving through the night. It's all unknown, that's a great thing. Your findings are important to your imaging keep it up. Cheers Nige.

M1 is being a pig to process, just no detail and loads of noise that the offsets didn't remove, literally a white fuzzy blob in the middle of a noisy star field.

Ian, good image of M 45, I must get more data for mine. Good to see you experimenting too . Plenty of nebula and dust there. the Rosette I posted is just a dimming of the highlights from the original. I think it will improve with the last stack ( processing tomorrow ) I will try to reduce star numbers or there size somehow There was a lot of moisture in the air last night. I think that's half the trouble with processing both my images. My scope had dew after about 40 minutes, I had to demist twice in 1.5 hours. The flower pot dew shield worked a treat with the lens though, 2.5 hours no problem . But seeing wasn't that good. Nige

This is a little work with photoshop express on the original . I have another stack to process tomorrow, last night's 245 subs were 50 % before street lights out and 50 % after, it's just the way it worked out. That last stack is the latter 50 % . Hopefully it will be better to process. Nige.

Can I do that with data from a dslr?

You wouldn't believe I have reduced the stars by a huge amount already, its such a rich star field around there. I will see how the next stack turns out and reduce more Cheers. Nige.

That's going to make mine look like a school boy error I took 245 x 30s lights but stacking them all made a mess of the image so I re stacked using 65% with a better result. Now I'm re stacking with 50% to see the result. Quite a hard one to process. M1 is being very hard to process for some reason. I ended up using my 210mm lens, I think the 135mm is far better than the 210mm after the last 2 images so next try on this target will be with the 135mm. Another thing I found out while drying the kit last night was I can use the LP filter with the manual focus lenses on. Didn't realise till after. This is NGC 2238, Rosette Nebula. 140x30s, 70 dark, 50 bias and 20 flat. Canon 1300D 210mm lens. DSS & ST. Nige.

Awesome, great detail and colours, stars are pretty much perfect. I love it. Well done. Nige.

78 on M1 so far , dumped 20+, still don't know the reason for such bad tracking at 30 second exposure. Sky's looking good here still.

I'm going to give M1 a try while waiting for my main target to rise high enough. Planning for a long one tonight.

The weather man has promised clear sky's all night long. First proper clear sky for 2 months here in Essex. I have chosen my target, it will be high enough at around 11pm. Depending on wind strength, either scope or 210mm lens. Ken, I hope you have got your mount up and running again. Hoping your sky's are clear too. Nige.

That's great, I like that a lot , well captured. I like the comet link too, saved to favourites . Thanks for sharing. Nige.

I wonder if the increase in star size is due to mount errors, the star moves around a tiny bit more.

That's quite an improvement Ken, the dark areas much more visible. Do you think adding 45s instead of increasing the amount of 30s made a difference? Personally I think it does with the fainter details. Hope you get your mount sorted out. Cheers Nige.

Oops sorry Ken. I think I might have and idea what's making mine play up, could be the altitude clutch, I won't know until the next time I use it as I have loosened it up when cleaning it a couple of days ago. Hmm I wonder.

I have had the 10 minutes good 5 bad for the last 3 maybe 4 sessions, the last being the worst. Not noticed it with the lenses. I have never had to re align before or rebalance, Normally I would align the mount 2 star, goto object to check accuracy, always do a sync encoder on one of the stars and go back to the object to start collecting data. This has worked fine in the past but something is not quite right. Nige.

This is quite interesting, I'mhaving trouble with mine at the moment, There's a bit of a routine to it. I get around 10 minutes of good tracking then dump 5 minutes this keeps repeating The other night I got 30 minutes of perfect subs then 1.5 hours of absolute rubbish even after realigning all of a sudden it started tracking ok but it was too late to continue. I haven't found an answer yet. Nige.

Ken Glad to hear you have sorted your mount, never nice when something like that happens. I went to a deep sky astrophotography talk this week, apart from the usual " you need a heq5 mount minimum " it was very interesting, the guy had a mono CCD with filter wheel and auto focuser. He said each colour filter needs to be focused individually, the auto focuser stores the focus for each filter and automatically focus with each filter, not sure how much they cost though. He also said about duel band and swapping colours in processing. .. using the red as blue and blue as red which had interesting results. Good luck for tonight, unfortunately there's broken cloud here, getting heaver. Cheers Nige

Thanks for your input, sorry about the music, I was thinking of removing it anyway, the options are very limited on the video editor I have. With the lasso I thought that roughly masking would be sufficient without explaining. I didn't realise I had missed the module and parameter text , I have mentioned them in part 3 of processing M42, that's where my mistake is Good idea to list the steps as they are performed. Thanks again. Nige

I have added that note in the channel description, thanks for pointing that out This is exactly the reason I asked for your opinions Thanks Nige.

Thanks for the link, very interesting. I'm certainly starting to understand the different types of noise and how to address them Measuring the camera is a great idea, I had no idea this was possible. I have a fair bit to read still though. Cheers Nige.

Hi guy's I have been working on a YouTube channel , Alt-AZ Astrophotography. for a day or so and would like your opinions, maybe how to improve and suggest videos to post or even if its worth it. So far I have uploaded a few processing video's and a showcase video. I'm planning to post video's on type of kit and capturing images. Here's a link if your interested https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCchMWf52QIubmbDcXYOP1Bw I would appreciate your honest opinions. Thanks for the link Ian, going to read it now. Cheers Nige.