scitmon

My first attempt with M31 which I am actually disappointed with. I found it very hard to process due to image noise. I am definitely going to attempt taking flats from now on!

wow thanks yeah. I've been playing around with Startools over the last couple of days, as has been recommended and managed to get some more out like you have. I think you have done a much better job than I have however. I may try Pixinsight but the price does put me off at this early stage when I have perhaps bigger priorities to spend money on. i.e. equatorial mount. Although this thread proves that equatorial may not be the be all and end all of astrophotography! I thought jpg's didn't contain curve data? I thought you could only manipulate the tiff or fits image types?

There is a Skywatcher FF that was made for the ED80 and I just assumed that would be beneficial regardless of the camera used. Thanks, I'll look into that and make sure it will be beneficial. Thank you for that book recommendation. I'll make a point to adding that on my next FLO order. I've not seen any light aberration, and the DS-pro supposedly virtually eliminates it. Having said that, I'm not really the person to ask as I have not had any experience with other telescopes to form a basis of comparison. I would recommend looking at this thread for ideas of what the ED80 can achieve: I was using a unmodified Canon 1000D on 1600 ISO for 15 seconds exposures. I think I will seriously look into getting Pixinsight, it looks impressive (and pricey).

Thank you for positive comments. I have a lot to learn about post images processing, hence the blueish tint to the image which seems to be a side effect of trying to tease out those colours of the nebula in Photoshop. I've only dabbled in moon shots and Jupiter until now. My original planned target last night was the Black Eye Galaxy but I was getting star trails even with 5 second exposures. I'm not sure why some targets seem to have less trailing than others, I guess its down the the proximity Polaris? I still need to astro mod my DSLR and buy a FF too, so hopefully better things are to come.

May I submit my first ever real attempt at a DSO with my ED80 Ds-Pro and Az GOTO SynScan... M27 Dumbbell Nebula:

On FLO, the NEQ6 is only £223 more than the HEQ5 Pro?

For imaging, definitely go for one of the eq6's if you can. I was in your shoes not so long ago and went with the ED80 DS-pro and have no regrets so far. I have yet to really see what it can do personally DSO wise because I don't have and eq mount yet, but you can see what can be done with it in a thread like this: To say that it would struggle on DSO's is a little unfair imo! Also buy this: https://www.firstlightoptics.com/books/making-every-photon-count-steve-richards.html