My first Widefield attempt - the Summer Triangle

[Hanuman]

This is pretty much a duplication from my astronomy log that I keep at http://astroukenaut.wordpress.com/ , mainly for my own purposes - It's neater than scribbling in a book.

Here's my starting image of the Summer Triangle.

I hadn't realised quite how bad my light pollution was until I saw this.

It's a 30 second exposure, sunlight white balance at ISO400 taken on a Canon EOS400D with a Sigma zoom set at it's widest 18mm focal length.

faintest stars you can see here are about magnitude 4.

I then tweaked it a bit in photoshop, adjusting levels to bring out fainter stars up to about magnitude 7. I removed the colour cast as best I could, although I think I went a bit too far as it's quite blue now.

Now I know this is far from perfect. It's a first attempt and I can see quite a few problems.

Stars aren't quite in focus. I'd focused manually and it's difficult to know in the dark through the camera eyepiece.

Next time I'll lock the mirror up to prevent that causing a bit of shake.

Exposure is only 30 seconds but I don't think I can do longer without the stars blurring with motion. I could, if I put the camera on the telescope's mount. There is a piggy back mounting screw.

I think I need to really up the ISO, perhaps up to 1600 to captured the fainter stars. I'd held back because I thought I'd end up overexposed with all the light pollution. I think though, that I can fix that with levels in processing.

I need to investigate stacking multiple images too.

I'd be interested in any suggestions or feedback. I appreciate there's a learning curve and my main thing at the moment is to spend time at the scope, learning the sky and finding stuff. However I figure this imaging is a cloudy night activity. If I set up the camera to capture a few shots whilst observing, I can then spend the cloudy evenings processing those images and perhaps see things that I'm just not seeing through the scope. For instance I have seen pictures on here of the milky way shot widefield and stacked from light polluted areas. It would be great if I could manage something like that.

Finally I annotated the final image in Skitch on the iPad to identify the various constellations and stars. That was an fun and educational thing to do. I hadn't noticed the small constellation Delphinus creeping in just below Cygnus for instance, and on zooming in and around the shot, I also noticed Collinder 399, Brocchi's Cluster aka the Coathanger sneaking in.