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M13 second attempt!!!


jonifive

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A beautiful clear night, so I had a go at M13 again, but this time with my SW Explorer 200.......

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(click to enlarge)

I took Phil's advise and focused on Jupiter early on, and it definitely paid off. Sadly my alignment was quick and dirty and I had had far too much Jamesons and two Don Thomas Toros to be super accurate, but I'm pleased with the result.

I took six 30 second images, but had problems stacking in DSS. Still haven't got to grips with this program! So this is just one cropped image, with simple levels and curves messed with in Photoshop.

You guys are welcome to play with the image if you want (cue CW and Ronaldo!!!)

And as usual, criticism is expected and taken on board and not to heart.

BTW, Phil and Greg....I tried to get the ring, but the alcohol got the better of me!

JV :(

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One shot... :shock: Lovely.. A bit of trailing, but with an aperture like that u can take shorter exposures to compensate that, and I just can't wait to see the "product" after stacking.. U are a lucky man John :(

Marius

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It turned out very well JF! Nice M13, perfect colour and sharp image too. As was said by Marius a slight trailing is visible but it's still very nice shot indeed. Polar alignment is my endless problem, I spend more time aligning than stargazing :(

Looking forward to seeing the stacked version of this one...

Martin :)

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Good second go JV , its getting there , but try now, leave the beers inside eheheheheh ,and get that polar alignment set up a wee bit better , its worth the time getting that as near right as possible ,then 30 /45 secs you can do no prob with no trailing, keep at it .

Rog

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Thanks fellas...

The trailing is quite obvious on the cropped version. To be honest I made no effort properly aligning the mount, it was just a best guess. I was so happy to be out I didn't care! In hindsight I should have set up properly as I know the final image would be a lot better.

Another problem is that I have to set up on my deck, and there are a lot of vibrations, especially when the dog walks past during an exposure :(

I also don't have a remote yet, so I can't use the bulb setting on the nikon. Me pressing buttons doesn't help either.

Anyway thanks you again for the support......and if anyone can point me in the direction of a Deep sky stacker walkthrough it would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

JV

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Thanks fellas...

The trailing is quite obvious on the cropped version. To be honest I made no effort properly aligning the mount, it was just a best guess. I was so happy to be out I didn't care! In hindsight I should have set up properly as I know the final image would be a lot better.

Another problem is that I have to set up on my deck, and there are a lot of vibrations, especially when the dog walks past during an exposure :lol:

I also don't have a remote yet, so I can't use the bulb setting on the nikon. Me pressing buttons doesn't help either.

Anyway thanks you again for the support......and if anyone can point me in the direction of a Deep sky stacker walkthrough it would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

JV

Given all of the above contra factors, its an amazing result! I have enough vibration problems on the concrete, I dread to think what a deck is like :(

Keep at it, you're making significant progress :)

Helen

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I also don't have a remote yet, so I can't use the bulb setting on the nikon. Me pressing buttons doesn't help either.

I was in the same position for a while and I found out I had two options.

1.Put someting elastic around the camera threaded through a nut, which keeps the shutter pressed. Set the camera to multiple shots mode. This will take one 30sec exposure after another and you don't have to press anything.

2.Set the countdown timer on the camera and press the button. You will get another 10ish seconds after you pressed the shutter and all vibrations will settle by the time.

Anyway thanks you again for the support......and if anyone can point me in the direction of a Deep sky stacker walkthrough it would be very much appreciated.

Johny, I just click on OPEN PICTURE FILES and load the images I've taken. Then I load all dark frames by clicking on OPEN DARK FILES, which are of the same ISO setting and exposure time as your images but with cap on on your camera.( Sorry if you know all this :() I am not worrying about flat and bias frames yet.

So after you loaded these you can see the list of all files you loaded on the bottom. I normally go through this list and look for the frames that have obvious star trailing and I do not check these so that the final images is not very bad. I check all the images without star trailing. Then I click REGISTER CHECKED PICTURES and then check STACK AFTER REGISTERING and set the percentage of best frames to be stacked to 100% because we have already selected best ones. You can of course forget the first bit of manually checking frames and click CHECK ALL in the main screen and then in REGISTER CHECKED PICTURES menu chose the percentage of best pictures yourself.( However I have not got good experience with results based on automatic selection of best pictures so I do it manually for now.) Then click OK and wait till it's done. After it was stacked you will see a final stacked image on a screen and also some setting with which you can modify it. I rarely touch these and only save an image and reopen it in photoshop and tweak it there. So I do SAVE PICTURE TO FILE and that's it.

I am only learning to use DSS and this is the way I do it, not sure if it's good but you can try it JF :)

Martin :lol:

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Thanks Helen and Steve :(

SteveL....I am loading RAWS. It stacks them happily but then produces a TIFF file which I can't open with anything, Even Photoshop.

BTW thanks for the image tweak, I knew one of you guys could improve it.

Jonathen.

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