First M45

[The_PSY3NTIST]

Got home last night to find beautiful clear skies (met office forecast said heavy cloud?) had an hour before I was going out so rushed to get the 200p out, polar align, and try the new dual axis motors out. Took 3 x 30s subs iso 800 + darks and bias then smashed them into dss for the first time and out came my first M45 How many more subs will I need to get the nebulosity and what are optimal settings? I know it's a hell of a lot more than the few I took

Cheers

[ollypenrice]

It depends on what your tracking will allow. I used 10 minute subs on this target at F3.9. It is hard to have too much data in astrophotography!!

Olly

[The_PSY3NTIST]

I just found I can get 60 seconds but not refined the pa so probably more. Total combined I was thinking. I've just been playing with ps curves and if I ramp it up I can see some in the data but can't get the back ground black if I do that. My ps skills are more suited to designing leaflets and flyers rather than ap unfortunately! Have you got any examples of your attempts and what settings / exposures you used?

Thanks for the reply

[nmoushon]

For me I took 3x3min subs with just my 300mm lens on my Canon and stacked them and I was just getting to see the nebulosity in that. I'm sure with at least an additional triple or more subs it would really start to show. Then again since I'm not attached to an OTA I can get away with longer subs so not sure how long you can get. But I would at least try for an hour worth of data.

One way to help with dark background is to go up a stop in f/ratio if you can. But that might not be suited for you circumstance since you can't take longer subs. Other way is curves in PS. Wherever your data is on the chart put a mark right in the middle of it and then another in btwn the edge of your data and the top right corner. Start pulling the left one down towards the bottom and the right one towards the top. It will take a bit of tweaking but will help darken it without loosing to much of the image.

[The_PSY3NTIST]

Thanks for that. Hopefully another clear night will come along soon. Seeing was best I've seen if for ages the other night, shame I had plans or would have got more data. I'll go for the hour of subs and have a good play with the curves next time. Will have guiding sorted soon so 5 min subs should be achievable. Can't wait to get it on m42 aswel but my house is in the way at the moment. A trip out to the peak district might be on the cards

Cheers for the advice.

[Cozzy]

with your kit, either the vixen or the 200 with the canon, 3X 90 secs ISO800 will get you the nebulosity you require, there is no substitute for data so take what you can.

Set to 18 saturation in DSS, tweak in PS/GIMP or what ever you have, play the the images see what you get , enjoy!!