First go at imaging the Pleiades

[vulkan]

A night of firsts last night, first go with guiding, first real try at an astrophoto, my first attempt at stacking and editing and my first shooting star bright enough to make me look up as it cast a shadow on the ground   

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicksshaw/10758562483/ 

A total of 9, 3 minute subs with 5 darks and 10 bias frames sat ISO400 (meant to be 800 but I had been fiddling with the camera and didn't check  ) stacked in DSS and edited in Lightroom.

it was 10 subs but the shooting star; while not actually passing through the frame was bright enough to mess one of them up.

constructive criticism welcome, I'm sure i have a lot to learn.

.tiff is uploading to dropbox and I'll link to it once its done in case anyone wants to take a look.

Nick

[Zuben Elgenubi]

Very nice indeed 

No criticism from me as it's far better than my only attempt so far at M45.

[JB80]

That is extremely good for a first attempt.

No mistaking the dust lanes there and the stars are nice and round.

Excellent.

[WaveSoarer]

That's really excellent. It doesn't have the appearance of a first attempt.

[vulkan]

Thanks Guys. 

Heres the link to dropbox, hopefully I did it right https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36415530/Pleiades.TIF

[robbie c]

That's a brilliant start Nick well done 

[lensman57]

Very nice and subtle, good control on the  stars and decent colour, great first try.

A.G

[Mr Spock]

Really good for a first attempt. Some seasoned pros don't get results this good

[wxsatuser]

Really good for a first attempt. Some seasoned pros don't get results this good

Seconded........nice pic

[PhotoGav]

Excellent - really great picture Nick. I clicked the link expecting to see a grainy, tiny, slightly out of focus collection of colourless blobs, but how wrong I was!!! I'm afraid I can offer no constructive criticism at all, but will be asking you for advice!

What's the next target going to be?!

[vulkan]

Thanks again everyone, I have to admit a bit of background in image editing helped, but mostly this forum.

I'm an obsessive researcher and have lurked around for many months on here to get as many tips as I can.

PhotoGav I think your Andromeda picture might have chosen my next target for me, either that or the Orion Nebula is just starting to peek over my neighbours house.

[PhotoGav]

Ha, swapsies... The next target on my list is M45! M42 is going to be my December/January project.

Your research shows through - isn't SGL just the most amazing resource.

Clear skies.

[Joves]

Looks pretty fantastic to me. As I was waiting for it to open, I was thinking "I wonder how he went at capturing the nebulosity?" - well, no need to wonder about that... It's about as nice an example as I've seen!!

[Leveye]

Just wonderful work. You captured the dust and the color is fantastic for only 9 lights at iso400. Is this with a Sony camera?

[ollypenrice]

This is very good and the processing extremely polished. Not over stretched, not clipped, good colour balance and even a hint of the elusive and faint reds in the deep background which is the tester for the ambitious imager.

However, there's one bizarre technical issue which I've never seen before. Look at the left-most cluster star with nebulosity around it. There's a curious waffle-like pattern around it. Examined closely this looks like a lot of adjacent defocused stars lined up in a grid pattern. They look like Polo mints, if you like. I think that for some reason this star has triggered a set of internal reflections. Maybe their location around this star is a coincidence and they have been triggered by another. We've all seen internal reflections before but this is quite strange.

Olly

Edit, I'll have a quick look at the TIFF.

[FeynGuy]

Absolutely stunning image, If my first comes out looking half as good as that i would be 'over the moon'!! haha

[ollypenrice]

OK, here we go. I can find no 'waffles' in the data so you must have cooked them up at some point in the processing!   It would be worth working out where in your workflow it happened, though. That star does often produce angry diffraction effects, as is the case here. That's par for the course, not a fault in your system. I had silmilar goings on in my Tak FSQ/CCD. When I combined data from two different cameras the effects tended the dilute each other and make life easier. The OSC camera produced a more 'spikey' star than the mono. http://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Best-of-Les-Granges/i-WQXKB6Z/0/X3/M45%20COMPOSITE%20FL-X3.jpg

Olly

[vulkan]

Thanks for the tips Olly, that picture on your page is truly incredible, I thought some dirt or condensation in the imaging train had caused the diffraction and may have put that odd effect in accidentally, I'm going to run though the steps just to see where it came from (benefits of Lightroom saving all the steps)

Thanks for taking a look

This was shot with the Sony NEX5 camera Leveye as well as a Baader Neodymium filter as I pretty much stand under a streetlight using the scope at the moment.