First wide field attempts, Jupiter & Pleiades and orion

[cstew]

Seen as last night was the first clear night in what seems like an age, I hastily grabbed my gear and decided to grab some wide field images, having been inspired by other posts I have seen on this site. All this took place in my back yard, not an ideal site, but owing to the "last minuteness" of this session, I was quite surprised how well things turned out. I moved just before Christmas, to the complete other end of town, far away from the heavily light polluted centre and the sky is noticeably darker, if I could get the council to switch off or shroud the pesky street lamp across the road it would be an ideal place to capture a few ad-hoc images when the feeling takes me.

I noticed that I can piggy-back my camera on top of my scope, there is a threaded stud on one of the scope clamps that I hadn't paid much attention to before, just suddenly wondered if it was the same diameter as a camera tripod mount and it was, you learn something new every day! So I lined everything up and started shooting, whilst also observing through the scope, multi-tasking or what! Equipment & settings:

Canon EOS 1100d

85mm f/1.8 lens @ f/2.8

3s@iso 800

I attempted some longer exposures, but got noticeable trailing, due to having an unguided Eq-2 mount.

I took a few single frames of Jupiter/Pleiades and 100 frames of Orion. I tried stacking the Orion frames in DSS but the resulting image seemed to be almost identical to a single frame!!?? So I must be doing something wrong I presume.

The upload process hasn't done them any favours, noticeably more pixellated and noisy.

I was however, quite happy to pick up some nebulosity in orion, and what I believe to be some Galilean moons.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated, I have read various guides and tutorials, but there is just so much going on in these stacking programs that it blows my mind at times! A guided mount is a definite must, once funds allow it!

[peroni]

These are great shots for you first attempt. I tried tripod astrophotography first and found you can get noticeably better results if you take many shots of your shorter exposure and stack them using deep sky stacker (DSS)

Include the standard darks, flats, and biases and you are onto a winner.

There are examples of Pleidaes on fixed tripod with 10s exposures totally 2 hours exposure stacked. You can see the whispy clouds and they look great.

Stack in Raw.

Piggy back is certainly possible. I tried it the other night (first time), you just need to make sure your camera and scope are aligned for the target if you are expecting to shoot wide field what you see in your scope.

DSS is surprisingly easy once you get into it.

The tricky part is processing in Photoshop or similar to eek out the detail of you stack.

My first wide field, piggy backed on a tracking mount (no guiding) and I got 4.5mins exposure easily and no star trails. Amazing detail in the image.

Keep it up.

[cstew]

I tried stacking RAW, but neither DSS or registax seems to like the RAW files from my 1100d, the ones from my 1d are fine, but it seems to clip the 1100d files, just turn out as a thin black bar.

[peroni]

I tried stacking RAW, but neither DSS or registax seems to like the RAW files from my 1100d, the ones from my 1d are fine, but it seems to clip the 1100d files, just turn out as a thin black bar.

I seem to recall someone else posting a similar problem recently. Download the beta version of DSS, that should fix it.

[cstew]

Cheers for that, downloaded the beta and it seems to handle the newer raw files, left it churning over night, but think I must have clicked something, ended up with something that looked like this

Will give it another go, make sure it's set to default!!

[BigDanDaw]

Only just seen the thread sorry. I'm hoping you have solved the problem by now. DSS did have some recent issues with RAWs that seemed to be related only to the 1100d but the beta version did solve it for me. I just did a couple of 2-3 sub stacks to test it to avoid the disappointment in the morning having ran it all night. I also got a screen like the one above when the computer went into hibernate and it didn't really recover.

Dan.

[Jannis]

I took a few single frames of Jupiter/Pleiades and 100 frames of Orion. I tried stacking the Orion frames in DSS but the resulting image seemed to be almost identical to a single frame!!?? So I must be doing something wrong I presume.

The upload process hasn't done them any favours, noticeably more pixellated and noisy.

I was however, quite happy to pick up some nebulosity in orion, and what I believe to be some Galilean moons.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated, I have read various guides and tutorials, but there is just so much going on in these stacking programs that it blows my mind at times! A guided mount is a definite must, once funds allow it!

It's a very nice start you have there.

As for DSS, it depends on how you stack and how many frames you stack. I normally use cappa-sigma clipping as i've found that to work best for me most of the times. Like in 99% of the times.

As for how the stacked image might look, you could have a look here. It goes through the basics of what stacking does. http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/theory.htm

[Jannis]

Cheers for that, downloaded the beta and it seems to handle the newer raw files, left it churning over night, but think I must have clicked something, ended up with something that looked like this

Will give it another go, make sure it's set to default!!

I've seen DSS spit out a lot of strange stuff over teh time, but ever seen anything like that, lol.

Hope you get it solved soon, as stacking raw is teh only way to go. alternatively, for now, you can batch process raw->uncompressed TIF in canon DPP, then stack the TIF files. A bit more work, but gives a much better result then stacking the JPGs at least.

[Delboy_Hog]

Very nice! I particularly like the orion shot. I can't offer any advice on the stacking I'm afraid, but keep it up, I look forward to seeing more of your photos in the future!

[cstew]

Thanks for the compliments, I did originally convert the raws to tiff and stacked those, and as for the mystery rainbow picture, I should have been a beta tester, if something can be broken, I can break it!!