My very 1st widefield shot...

[bigbox]

So heres a single unprocessed shot taken last night, its a 60 sec exposure, iso 800, f3.5 &18mm focal lenght. i'm unable to edit/process it at he moment but i'm fairly happy with it, think i need to drop the iso or something so the sky is darker or maybe shorter exposures...

All feed back accepted good & bad.

[saturn5]

Thats a good start.Focus is just a tad off.A foreground object of interest always helps the composition of the shot.I dont envy you your location.Having worked in Derby and been quite astonished at the LP in the midlands in general i dont think i would even bother taking up astronomy.Perhaps i'm spoilt up here but it really was depressing seeing all that lights,even the main constellation stars were hard to make out.

I think anything but the shortest exposures will turn out orange given your location but maybe someone with experience from the midlands could advise you on that.

Heres a link that shows you how to get rid of light pollution using photoshop.

http://galacticfool....tion-photoshop/

Cheers

Stewart.

[Paulus17]

Nice shot BB.

One tip i was recently told was to use the tungsten setting in the White Balance menu to cut down on the orange glow.

On my Nikon i use the incandescent setting which is the same i think??

[davew]

You can chalk two firsts. First wide field and first galaxy. Spot it ?

Well done on the effort.

Dave.

[LukeSkywatcher]

So heres a single unprocessed shot taken last night, its a 60 sec exposure, iso 800, f3.5 &18mm focal lenght. i'm unable to edit/process it at he moment but i'm fairly happy with it, think i need to drop the iso or something so the sky is darker or maybe shorter exposures...

All feed back accepted good & bad.

I like many others (and yourself) have the same problem with LP. I find that instead of a single 60s exposure that six exposures of 10s each is better. I really only shoot at 800 iso.

Your focus seems pretty good but could do with a slight tweak.

Overall...............a perfectly good image. It just needs a few seconds of postprocessing to darken the sky and bobs your uncle.

[LukeSkywatcher]

You can chalk two firsts. First wide field and first galaxy. Spot it ?

Well done on the effort.

Dave.

I did. I always used Cass to locate it (now i can spot it on its own). I wont give the game away.

Lets see if bigbox can spot it.

[bigbox]

Hi guys Thanks for all the feedback, i'm going out again for a few hours if it stays clear tonight. Saturn5, i have to agree the LP around here is awful, i head about 10 - 15 miles out of city when i get the chance which these days is very few & far between... As for the galaxy i do believe its andromeda

[LukeSkywatcher]

Hi guys Thanks for all the feedback, i'm going out again for a few hours if it stays clear tonight. Saturn5, i have to agree the LP around here is awful, i head about 10 - 15 miles out of city when i get the chance which these days is very few & far between... As for the galaxy i do believe its andromeda

Yes indeed, it is Andromeda. Take many shorter exposures and stack them (using DSS) and Adromeda will pop right out.

[JamesF]

I'll go against the grain and suggest sticking with the longer exposures but trying some sort of LP filter. I'm lucky in having very little LP here, but it does start to bleed into long exposures close to the southern horizon, so I've bought a 2" Skywatcher LP filter to try with the camera lens. I'm just waiting for the step-down ring to arrive now (I'm using the Canon kit 18-55mm lens which has a 58mm thread on the front, so I think it needs a 58mm to 48mm step-down to fit the filter). It will be interesting to see what difference it makes.

James

[bigbox]

So here's a few i took last night, edited in lightroom 3, added tungstun filter..

[Hanuman]

I've just had a go at and posted in another thread my first widefield with similar washed out orange results. I got a bit more out of it with some photoshop tweaking - levels and colour cast mainly. Need to look into this stacking stuff but probably need more ISO to capture those pesky photons in the first place.

[Jannis]

Very nice first attempt indeed. And that kit-lens can take nice pics as well. I've found out at 18mm it's best to stop it down to 5.6 though. Manually focusing it is a real nightmare with that focus ring. I recommend to use live view, 10x zoom on display and focus on a bright star roughly in teh centre of the display. Then turn off AF and shoot away. Recheck focus once in a while though, especiallt if the temperature changes.

The first pic is almost in focus, but white balance is off,. The two other pics ahve a much more correct white balance, but are also a tiny bit off focus. I must say, if that's tungsten white balance, then you've really got a lot og LP in your area.

Always shoot in RAW, so you get more details out, and you won't have to worry about white balance anyway as you can change it later.

I did a very quick try in adjusting the white balance of your first pic a little, hope you don't mind?

Didn't get it quite as i wanted though, but first time i open a astrophoto for editing in PS in over a half year, so...

Edit: don't know why, but for me the uploaded pic looks horrible in firefox and windows photo viewer, but when saved and opend in PS or infranview it looks like it's supposed it.. :/