With and without city lights

[Kenza]

Last weekend was my first astro session away from city lights. The altitude was 1150m. It's amazing how much light pollution affects imaging. Here are two examples of M31 shot from two different places.

Also can someone please suggest a good Photoshop astro tutorial because I am sure I could have extracted much more detail from my stacked subframes.

[JamesF]

That's a big difference  I think perhaps you've pushed the core a bit too hard in that second image though,

There are loads of tutorials on youtube for prcocessing.  If you look for posts by Quatermass here you should find links to some he's done, but there are also these ones:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD1E1162212A88E25

James

[Delboy_Hog]

Can't help with the tutorial I'm afraid, but thought the difference in your two images is really striking, and I love your second capture - the dust lanes look really deep and impressive in that one! 

Can I ask what kit / exposure length you were using here?

[Kenza]

Can't help with the tutorial I'm afraid, but thought the difference in your two images is really striking, and I love your second capture - the dust lanes look really deep and impressive in that one! 

Can I ask what kit / exposure length you were using here?

Thanks Delboy! 

Telescope: SW Equinox 120mm/900mm

Mount: EQ6 Syntrek Polar aligned and controlled via EQMOD

Guidescope: SW Startravel 80mm

Guide Camera : Lodestar

Imaging Camera: Canon 550D with Astronomik CLS EOS Clip Filter

Lights: 5x 360sec , 2x 600 sec     Total: 50 mins

No Darks or Flats

[Delboy_Hog]

Thanks for that - very nice indeed! 

[Kenza]

As a matter of fact I not sure that i have done the stacking in DSS correctly. Maybe it could have been better. I wanted to get natural colors on M31 but I don't know how to do it.

[symesie04]

Big difference. You have posted the details of the second image but what about the first so we can make a more accurate comparison. Second image is starting to look good. Just need at lot more time on it. Regarding the processing there are many and many different ways of doing it. Youtube is definitely a good place to look, but also have a flick through the imaging discussion section in this forum as there are loads of links and tips posted. Good luck.

[Kenza]

Big difference. You have posted the details of the second image but what about the first so we can make a more accurate comparison. Second image is starting to look good. Just need at lot more time on it. Regarding the processing there are many and many different ways of doing it. Youtube is definitely a good place to look, but also have a flick through the imaging discussion section in this forum as there are loads of links and tips posted. Good luck.

I think this is a better comparison. Here is one of the 360 sec subframes of the second image.

The first one was a stack of 3 x 360 sec

[symesie04]

Ah so the exposure lengths are the same. Wow that really does illustrate the difference a dark sky makes. They say the most important thing on a astrophotographers list is the mount, but maybe a dark sky site should be first on the list.