Paul2019

Well, im fed up with struggling to focus at 55mm as I think the lens is just crappy, but heres 29 x 20s @ ISO400. Processed in PS and im chuffed with it. Its widefield for sure but theres Lyra, Cygnus and Hercules in there

I just spotted the top corner then so heres it re done abit,

I know its still not amazing but for my 5th picture its definitely getting there. Im going to enter this one into the competition for the kicks lol

2 minutes ago, Anthony1979 said:

Lol let me no how you get on 

I will post the results. On another note I have sourced a reasonably priced WO zenithstar 66 SD. Once thats bought I can think about a mount. I was going to go with the mount first but this is too well priced to pass up

3 hours ago, Nigella Bryant said:

The longer the subs the better for stacking. You can get away with 20secs without tracking b4 stars begin to trail. 

Image below was tracked but stacked 5x 30sec subs with a 300mm telephoto lens so you can see what you can do. Native 55mm lens would be easy to do 20sec subs. 

Awesome picture! How did you process it?

2 hours ago, Anthony1979 said:

I tried 20 sec with 55mm but get trails max i seem to get is 8 secs 

Much like Anthony, I can only seem to get 8 secs but its looking clear tonight so ill attempt 20s and see what happens

Hello again,

Last night I attempted to image using the kits lens again but at 55mm f5.6. I started out on Lyra again and was quite happy with the result. Its 50 x 8s subs @ iso400. 

Im actually pretty happy with this one and I am pleased with the result. 

My attention then turned to Cygnus with my target star being Deneb. I thought I would try to extend the exposure time to 10 seconds and upped the ISO to 800 to see the difference. On the indivual subs I found more detail but after stacking found I was unhappy with it. I think 10s is also too long. Heres the result of 32 x 10s

Both images processed very slightly in photoshop, im sure a lot more could be done with them but im still learning what to do with them, as always thoughts and critisms welcomed.

Paul

For me its got to be the first one 

Awesome images either way though

I'm another vote for try it, technically it may be too much. I dont own a mount at the moment but I would say be wary of the RA motors if your tracking because overloading those could put a quick end to it all. Buti dont know they weight of the OTA or camera your using. 

Please do share your attempts/efforts 

Paul

32 minutes ago, des anderson said:

A great start, good images well done. Des

Thanks, I just wish it would stop raining for a few days.

12 minutes ago, tomato said:

That’s a great ‘static’ widefield shot, way better than any I took when I first started out. M31 will show up in your widefield shot, be patient, it will be much better placed when Sept/Oct roll around.👍

Thanks for your comments, I cant wait until the winter for the earlier nights and better imaging prospects with Pleiades, Orion and M31 being far better positioned for me. I live under bortle 3/4 depending on where in the garden I am so I am very hopeful for a productive winter. Im ust trying to get my basics with the camera and tripod before making it more complex.

1 hour ago, Anthony1979 said:

this was my attempt

I hope you dont mind but I have processed it a tad further for you and ran it through astrometry to see what you shot, 

Heres the results using the same technique as my Hercules image

The picture shows part of Lyra with the brightest star being Vega and the rest goes into Cygnus. I am very interested to hear how many subs, exposure times etc. It looks great!

Paul

3 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

I think you're going well.

My advice concerns the background sky in which I think two adjustments are needed.

1) It is somewhat green. In Photoshop just choose the Colour Sampler tool in the Eyedropper menu and set the sampler to 3x3 or 5x5 average. Place 4 sample points a little in from each and read the RGB values in the Info section. Personally I like to have each colour at the same value, something like 23/23/23. I think you'll find green is quite high. There are various ways to adjust this. Colour balance set to shadows would do it, as would bringing in the black point in the green channel. The sampled values will also lead us to the second adjustment...

2) Slight gradient. The sky is a little brighter in the lower left hand quadrant.  I deal with gradients using Pixinsight and don't do it in Ps, though it can be done. Perhaps someone could advise? There is a reasonably priced Ps plugin called Gradient Xterminator which will do it, and there's Hasta La Vista green for free/donation on the Deep Sky Colors website. This isn't strictly a gradient tool, it removes unwanted green which is often a problem in DS imaging for some reason. A crude way to attack the gradient would be to use the burn tool set to shadows at about 2% using a huge fully feathered eraser but this would be a bodge!

Talking of bodges, you can round up those stars as well: rotate the image till the elongation is horizontal on the screen. Make a copy layer. Set the blend mode from normal to darken in Layers. Go to Filters-Other-Offset and offset one layer horizontally by a small amount till the stars look round. You may find the smallest you can do is a bit too much but that's fine. Apply and then go to Edit-Fade and fade the offset till your stars look good. Flatten and re-rotate the image back to how it was.

Olly

Hi Olly,

Thank you so much for this, it was really helpful and made me figure some stuff out I didnt quite understand already. I am confident that the gradient in the image is caused by moonlight as it was fairly close at the time of shooting, but GradientXterminator really fixed that well.I am hopelessly colour blind which makes editing images tricky at the best of times, however using the point sampler and comparing the colour values made this far far easier. I tried your trick to reduce the bloated stars but it removed a lot of the data from the image so I decided that I was happy with the result even though they are slightly bloated. I am now very happy with this image after going through your advice and considering this is my second attempt I am definitely a happy bunny. I know I still have lots to learn and I am definitely adamant that I first need to be consistently producing good wide field images before I add more things into the equation like tracking mounts and scopes as I am sure this will only complicate things further plus I think I need to start considering adding flats and darks to my stacks which may improve them further as well. Anyways heres the new image

Again thanks so much for all the input you guys have had so far its really made things easier for me to understand and spurs me onto the next one.

Paul

3 hours ago, Demonperformer said:

And you haven't been doing it for nearly as long! It is good to learn from others, but never compare yourself to them. If you do, you run the risk of simply trying to take their pictures, which will leave you feeling empty. The question should be, what do you think of the result? Does it show what you set out to capture? For what it is worth, I think it is a good representation of the area. There are so many DSO gems in the area that it is easy to forget widefield. After seeing this one, I would like to see what you would achieve with Cygnus with the clouds of milky way stars flowing through it.

What f-stop were you using? I know the temptation I always had with camera lenses was to open them fully to get as much light as possible, but even the "nifty fifty" benefits from being closed down slightly.

For AP, this is a good book. It does not say much about widefield, but the principles it lays down and processing advice are as valid there as with tiny subjects. My personal opinion is that, for imaging, the ed72 would be a lot easier that the 130, but by the time you factor in the flattener (for imaging) and diagonal (for visual) it will be quite a bit more expensive, so don't let me  spend your money!

I'm unsure on the f-stop, but I'm happy with it to a degree but its clear the 20s subs are too long as theres some clear trailing on the image. Its by no means perfect and I do have a bit of a habit of being my own worst critic, so I doubt I will ever be 100% happy. Cygnus will definitely be my next target as I would also be keen to see what is achievable there. I am very sure the Frac is what I want however.

1 hour ago, alan potts said:

Keep at it, there are some wonderful people on here that are full of helpful advice and even though I didn't full understand some of their answers, they were happy to put nit into village idiot terms for me. The only thing I would say is I can't see M13 on there at 20seconds which surprises me. I can see that without optics from my garden on good nights, though it is a fair bit higher here.

Alan.

Its definitely there but its not exactly anything special, I am hoping to improve with practise but I really want to get the hang of widefield and using the DSLR before I add more kit into the equation.

47 minutes ago, wxsatuser said:

It's there, if the OP does'nt mind I cropped out the bit to show it, stretched a little as well.

Thanks for this, I would of done it otherwise. Its actually not that bad when you have stretched it. Out of curiosity what did you do to keep it looking this good? Also this image is a compressed PNG so I am even more impressed with it. 

Thanks for all your replies and responses. I will aim for Cygnus as my next target to see how that goes, hopefully I will produce something worth entering into the competition before it closes. Heres to cloud free nights,

Paul

So heres my second attempt done tonight, typically I haven't had a clear night since my last attempt and the one we do get is after a 12 hour shift but needs must and all that. Its a widefield constellation shot of Hercules also in the frame is Lyra and Corona Borealis, but if you squint really hard and zoom in you can kind of make out where M13 and M92 are as very small fuzzies.  My first load of subs were out of focus and deep sky stacker wouldn't have them and I got a few more and then the clouds rolled in limiting me to just 7 usable subs. Taken with my canon 400d 18mm lens.

7 x 20s subs @ ISO 800, processed in photoshop. Its definitely an improvement on my first attempt but I'm still not that happy with it but until I get a scope and mount all I can do is widefield stuff. I am seriously considering the 130p-ds with Eq3-pro from first light optics but I'm still very torn between this and an ed72. I do want to use it visually occasionally and having previously had a 90mm Achro Frac I know what to expect here with that but sense is telling me the reflector would be best but I really love fracs.  I've been waiting for M31 but unfortunately at this time of year its too low for me to image from home as there happens to be a street light right in the way.

There truly are some amazing images on this forum and some very talented induvials, I know what I have so far are no where near the same level but someday I hope to be taking amazing images too. Please share your criticisms and thoughts on how I can improve it is very much appreciated as without it I wouldn't have the foggiest on how to improve. 

Hello, good luck with your setup. Id be keen to see what you produce

14 hours ago, bobro said:

The overlay is from nova.astrometry.net where images can be uploaded for platesolving. Once you have posted a number of times (can't remember exact number - 10?) you will be able to attach images.

Thanks for the link. Really helpful, hopefully will have a clearish night tonight for round 2

2 hours ago, wxsatuser said:

I would set the lens to 18mm and take long enough exposures until you see the stars start to trail, 18mm should get 25secs easily.

Jerry Lodriguss has a few tutorials have a look here.

http://www.astropix.com/html/j_digit/toc_dig.html

 

Thats the plan for the next clear night. I really want to invest in a goto eq mount and a apo refractor but feel like its pointless until I have the basics figured out. 

4 hours ago, bobro said:

Some very aggressive use of curves and down-scaling to reduce noise starts to reveal some stars. Thought you might like to see the constellations you captured. Longer subs will certainly help. 

Thanks, I was aiming at Vega in Lyra. How did you do the overlay? I played in photoshop and achieved similar results. Out of curiousity how do you post images on this forum?

Ok so some lesson learnt here, make sure camera settings are good as theres way too much noise in this to process properly. I need more data, try for longer subs. And keep trying, thanks for your help

3 hours ago, wxsatuser said:

Normally the Autosave tif will be very dark.

You will need to stretch the image with some software like Photoshop or something similar.
There are some free apps like Gimp if you don't want to splash out.

Your stack is full of hot pixels, might be worth adjusting the DSS settings to fix these.

Out of interest what setup are you using and the camera settings might be useful.

I have both photoshop and gimp but I have no clue what to do with them, Camera is a Canon 400d with the standard 18-35mm lens. Exposure time was 4 seconds @ iso1600 (Which was supposed to be 800). 

Can you remove hot pixels? 

Paul

Hi All,

Long time lerker but first time poster here. I have just made the decision to move into astrophotography and I have got a DSLR and I have just taken my first photo. Its 9 x 4sec subs of lyra stacked in DSS. But now I am stuck with no idea at all on how to process it. Any tips or pointers appreciated. 

Thanks 

Paul

Autosave001.tif