Herzy

Why would it? Sorry, I don't know too much about altaz.

You really need more integration. Integration is key. Especially on M33, where the spiral arms aren't very well defined in your image and there isn't much detail to be had. That is because the noise is just too strong relative to signal. You need at least 4x the integration to improve the sharpness by 2x and reveal details half as bright (due to diminishing returns) and that is well worth the effort. You would be surprised how much detail you could pull out of a 4hr stack vs a 1hr stack. I was certainly surprised with the results of M16 (1hr vs 9hrs). It was a HUGE difference. Also, your color balance is a little off. Not sure what is causing that. At the end of this day, the images are great. They would impress almost anyone you showed. Good job!

That's because averaging does far less work. Assuming your dithering property, any correlated noise or walking noise will be removed from a reject/sigma algorithm.

I haven't been out either because the moon is wrecking my view of the Eagle Nebula which I have an ongoing project on. You mentioned earlier how you feel you've reached the limit of your mount/scope so I'll chip in on that. Longer exposures and more of them will help... ALWAYS. Due to diminishing returns 4 hours will produce 2x less noise then 1 hour. 4 hours is a long time but it is worth it. If you put in that kind-of time you will get amazing images fast. Another problem you might be facing is that your imaging targets that are really faint. Your skies seem to be better then mine so I can't really comment on this with much accuracy but at my house I can't image the NA nebula because it is too faint. My 90 second subs are simply too short to distinguish nebulosity from noise. No matter how many subs I take it won't matter because I'm still not capturing any nebulosity. You might have something similar going on when you go after the faint nebulas. Just my $0.02. Hayden

I know this thread is supporting alt/az mounts and all but if you want to really get into serious imaging with a guider to image some of the best objects available an EQ mount will be needed. If you are going to go down that route you want to get a good one because your mount is the most important part. That can be VERY expensive. So just as a reminder this should be on your list. With an alt/az mount guiding is not really needed because of the rotation. An APO refractor will definitely help short-term but if you want to long-term improve to your astrophotography skills an EQ mount is the way to go. So that's long-term. If you want to best improve your results here and now a nice APO refractor would be good. An achromat refractor will be pretty good but eventually the CA will start to annoy you. Hayden

Oh, thats awful! I hope she is okay!

A coma corrector will work regardless of the mount. It just fixes the elongated stars. I don't have one atm because I'm not really annoyed by the strangely shaped stars but most people use one. As for if you should go with a 130p-ds, that is a very nice scope for astrophotography but eventually your going to want an APO refractor. So I would suggest you upgrade to the 130p-ds now and then save up for an APO because they are very good for astrophotography.

Field flatteners go in your scope's focuser and fix the oblong stars in the corners/edges of images. CA is something specific to achromatic refractors. It's strange color fringing around bright objects that is especially distracting in astroimages. APO refractors were designed to remove this problem by focusing all wavelengths of light in the same place though a series of lenses. Newtonians don't have CA because they don't use lenses. There is a quick rundown, hope it helps!

Man I wish I had your optical tube, Nigel! I can't fit NGC 7000 in the FOV of my scope. I'm heading to an observatory for some dark skies and my EQ mount is too heavy/bulky to bring so I will be imaging with my SLT mount. In the next week Ill have an image of the Lagoon Nebula.

Let me get this straight - If I take a 30 second exposure at ISO 3200, my histogram peaks 30% from the left side. However, if I take a 75 second exposure at ISO 800 I get the same result. Which is better? One more question: I'm limited to 30 second exposures right now because I don't have an intervalometer to insure that I get the correct exposure length. Would it be beneficial to increase the ISO to increase the brightness of what i'm imaging?

That won't do much. Stacking is able to remove noise because noise is random, so over the period of many pictures it can figure out what's random and what isn't. If you stacked the same picture 100x the randomness of the noise wouldn't be there.

Pesky little buggers! I had a big moth fly towards my phone, the only source of light out there. I frantically tried to hit it away and I knocked my scope out of alignment.

If I had taken an image as good as that I would print it and have it hung up! How good are your skies?

That's what I'm using. I was simply congratulating others for their amazing results and looking for targets to image.

Jesus Christ that is a lot of stars... You must have much darker skies then me. Maybe it's just that yours is a relatively wide field of view, but I doubt that my images would look anything like that. (I have skies that are 6 on the bortle scale) That image is beautiful! I think I will give nebula this a go the next clear night I get.

Is the North America nebula bright? I haven't tried it, but would I be able to get some good detail out of it in about 1.5 hours of data? That is especially beautiful... Amazing job! Also what is the focal length of your scope?

I never get time to image with school. I'm limited to imaging only on clear nights on weekends. With the weather over here that's like 1 clear night a month.

(removed: accidentally double-posted.)

Great picture I can't wait to see the image once you've got more data! This is my next target.

I'm in this situation right now. I have a T-ring and an adapter ring stuck together. I've scraped my hands to the point of bleeding twisting them. I've tried WD40, I've tried sticky gloves, and I've tried running hot water on it. Any ideas?

I fixed that! My DSLR was weighing down th back so it was giving bad star trails. I just attached a bag of flour to the front to balance it out. I don't always get good stars, but maybe 70% of my pictures work out well!

Believe it or not, I used after effects. You probably haven't heard of it because it's not an image editor, but a video editor. It's by the same company that makes photoshop so there are a lot of similarities between the two. I didn't use any dedicated astro-packages, but I tried my best to get rid of the light pollution!

I used a Nexstar SLT mount for this one. M42 is low in the sky so light pollution is awful. However I was able to capture some detail in it!

Beautiful results Steve... I wish I could do that!

Oh, lol i probably sound pretty stupid, I didn't know that abbreviation.