My first Dumbell Nebula

[Steve Wright]

It took me a while to find the dumbell but once I did the mount was tracking well and I fiddled for ages with focus and finally settled down with what I thought was the best focus I could see through the viewfinder of my Nikon D3100 using prime focus..

Stacked 29 x 30 sec lights and 10 darks @ ISO800 in DSS, tweaked with levels and curves in Photoshop and zoomed and cropped to resize the object , I am quite happy with the result but still not sure what is wrong as the stars look out of shape and I am not sure if its the result of poor focus, collimation or bad optics or something else I am not aware of?

Any comments or advise would be greatly appreciated so I can hope to progress to better results thanks

[laser_jock99]

Nice effort- looks like tho odd star shape might be down to tracking errors?

[alpal]

Nice effort- looks like tho odd star shape might be down to tracking errors?

Yes - the mount wasn't tracking well.

Looks like it needs OAG guiding.

[Gina]

With the extra magnification from cropping the image I think you will need guiding. That's what I've found. Nice start

[sabin_fota]

I think that your tracking is poor

[Gina]

Yes, you need the tracking as good as you can get it even if you do use guiding - gives the guiding less to do and gives better star shapes. I used drift alignment which I found the most accurate method. Mine's quite reasonable now - I can do up to a minute with the scope and 5 mins widefield with telephoto lens without guiding.