M36, M37 & M38

[andyboy1970]

[brantuk]

I have to say something here for any newbies looking at Andys pics. The stunning thing about these images is that they are all taken on very very basic equipment.

The ST80 is a small £100 refractor more commonly used for guiding. I had no idea that it was so capable of dso imaging and these pics are a striking demonstration of low budget deep sky photography. All credit to you Andy - I'm well impressed

[foundaplanet]

Well done Andy, tidy collection.

[sloz1664]

Andy,

As a astrophotgraphic newbie I would appreciate which software pakages are you using to create such magical photographs. Albeit the hard work is in getting the shots beforehand.

cheers

Steve

[Ags]

Andy, are these cropped? I find star images tend to bloat toward the edges of myimages shot through an ST80, so I'm impressed by the tightness of your stars.

[RobH]

Well done....great images from kit that doesn't cost thousands

Cheers

Rob

[andyboy1970]

Andy,

As a astrophotgraphic newbie I would appreciate which software pakages are you using to create such magical photographs. Albeit the hard work is in getting the shots beforehand.

cheers

Steve

I capture using BackyardEos, which allows framing to be done using looping exposures I set to about 10 seconds.

Stack with Deepsky stacker and a little tweek with Photoshop5.

The final images are displayed on pages created in Microsoft Publisher and saved as PNG files. These are for my own personal book of images and are also a lot smaller files (2.5Mb) compared to the original picture files that are 30-50Mb each.

The ST80 looks a little silly perched on top of my EQ5 with one counterweight about an inch from the top of the shaft.

[andyboy1970]

Andy, are these cropped? I find star images tend to bloat toward the edges of myimages shot through an ST80, so I'm impressed by the tightness of your stars.

They are cropped but only slightly for two reasons, 1) slightly odd shaped stars at the edge, 2) Deepsky stacker leaves funny edges due to slight changes as the tracking will never be perfect, these cause funny Histograms and are best cropped before tweeking in PS5.

[guyroch]

I capture using BackyardEos, which allows framing to be done using looping exposures I set to about 10 seconds.

Stack with Deepsky stacker and a little tweek with Photoshop5.

The final images are displayed on pages created in Microsoft Publisher and saved as PNG files. These are for my own personal book of images and are also a lot smaller files (2.5Mb) compared to the original picture files that are 30-50Mb each.

The ST80 looks a little silly perched on top of my EQ5 with one counterweight about an inch from the top of the shaft.

Thanks for the BackyardEOS plug Andy.

Guylain

[AndyH]

Ahhh. The Auriga three. I check them out whenever Auriga is about.

Very nice Andy.