Another M42! First Ever DSO

[austen4]

Hell everyone,

earlier this week I decided after getting I need to do some imaging for the first time with my telescope. It looks ok but I now have found out I will need a guide camera to get any better subs! I can now see this is going to be expensive . It is made up of around 13x80 second subs and 8x30 second and 7x10 seconds and darks for all the different exposures. Any comments would be great as I am a complete newby.

Thanks for looking

[Chris]

Good first attempt! I've only been on the imaging side of astronomy for about 5-6 months also so I'm not an expert either, plenty of people on here are and I'm sure they will give you better advice than me. I'll let you know what I've learnt through trial and error so far though I notice you suffer from elongated stars like myself, I have this problem with my basic eq5 it has chronic periodic error, I improve it by taking lots of really short subs and I still go through them at the end and chuck out most of them because of elongated stars, but in doing so I get better quality images even though I end up with less data to play with. So I was wondering if you had gone through your frames and chucked out the ones with the worser examples of elongated stars (If not I suspect these are mainly on your 80 sec subs) and if you re-processed with less frames but non smeared frames, wether you would get better star shapes and also crisper nebulae detail? I've been amazed at what detail you can bring out with short subs, but having said this I would also really like long subs

[Fenriz]

Its a good image Austen, I have the same mount and can easily get 200second with it, with accurate polar alignment you should be able to reach about 5minute with it.

[ollypenrice]

Lots to admire there. Yourshort subs should get you much much deeper into the Trapezium but I'm guessing you combined all sub lengths into the same stack? That's not the way. Try this;

Compositing 2 Different Exposures via Layer Masks

Your colour balance is very good and you have a nice colour depth, too.

Yes, we all need to autoguide... and spend!!!

Olly

[austen4]

Thanks everyone for the replies. I think my oval stars are to do with my collimation in which I am going to do.

Fenriz thats impressive sub lengths, I will try to get better polar allignment. I could get up to 130 ish but the clouds rolled in and I decided to go in.

Thanks Olly, I will try a reprocess today using the tutorial.

Thanks again all