First attempt at Rosette Nebula @ 50mm

[Jannis]

Once upon a time, in windy, slightly cloudy Norway, there was a weird man lurking outside in the dark... ok, enough story telling, on to the topic...

Ok, so I never actually intended to give this a go in the first place, I just wanted to see if I could capture anything at all.

Like i said, both windy and slightly clouded, so I didn't have high hopes at all.

So i took 2x 400 sec subs at ISO200 with my canon 50mm 1.4 @ 2.8 on the HEQ5 mount unguided, and went back in for the night.

The first pic is the one i got out of the camera.

After stacking the two frames in DSS (light frames only), i got a pic that didn't really look much better at all. But i started to stretch the pic to the moon and back in PS, and ended up with this.

Then, after accidently deleting the TIFF file instead of the JPG, and was left only with that rubbish noisy JPG, I gave up...

...untill now. After 2 months with bad weather, i thought i'd might as well test my noise removal skills on this pic, as it was the only pic i had of that nebula anyway and i wanted it better.

So I gave it another go in PS, and the final result became quite OK i think, especially concidering the single rubbish JPG i had to work on..

[astro mick]

A bit of a journey,but quite a remarkable recovery.It just shows what can be achieved with relatively simple techniques,and a bit of photo-shop wizardry.

Mick.

[Jannis]

Yepp, and now that i know i can capture it in the first place, i will be going for this target another day for sure, and then i'll get much closer then with my 50mm lens!

I expected to Maaaaybe see a small pinkish dot at 50mm, but aperantly that lens was sharper and brighter then i thought at f/2,8.

The colours are off though, and i didn't get it too look like it was supposed to look like. But overall i'm satisfied, concidering the conditions..

Just need to fix my guiding first. seems like my 135mm f/3,5 lens + the unmodded (none-LX) SPC900 might not be able to be sensitive enough, but i'm crossing my fingers... n_n

If not i guess i'll just buy a guiding package like the orions starshoot atoguider + the orion ST80 and some guiderings or something. this is my 3rd season without proper guiding, so getting tired of being limited to 15-60 sec exposures (depending on my luck with polar alignment and alignment, lol). But one day...