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M31 - First attempt at manual guiding


JimS

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Hi all,

Fantastic night last night, took friends and better half out to view Leonids over the Severn Estuary and have a look around the night sky, also first chance to try out the imaging set up I currently have:

C8 SCT F10 with a 6.6 focal reducer

Startravel ED80 as guidescope

Canon 450D

Logitech C300 webcam as guider

After a bit of faffing around trying to get the webcam to find and focus on a guidestar, I started taking a series of 4 min subs of M31 using the digital reticle in SharpCap to manually guide the scope. I will at some point invest in a Autoguider....!

Eventually finished at 3.30am with frost forming all over the equipment, cases and laptop. Time to retreat to bed....!

Just stacked five 4 min subs with darks in DeepSkyStacker and had a little play in Photoshop. Still a huge amount to learn and experience to gain but I am very happy with my first attempt at exposures longer than a minute.

All feedback greatly accepted!

M31 - Andromeda Galaxy 181112 small.tif

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That's a great result for such a small amount of data. You should be very pleased with how well the dustbands stand out, and you can probably still coax a bit more out of it in the post process.

The core is overexposed, that is all really. See if you can experiment with either shorter subs or smaller ISO (as long as you keep away from the dreaded 800).

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That's a great result for such a small amount of data. You should be very pleased with how well the dustbands stand out, and you can probably still coax a bit more out of it in the post process.

The core is overexposed, that is all really. See if you can experiment with either shorter subs or smaller ISO (as long as you keep away from the dreaded 800).

ISO 800 was exactly the sensitivity I was using. Why do you say the dreaded 800?

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