First proper widefield, Deneb.

[leemanley]

Had a great night in the garden on Saturday, the first one in months. Here's my first attempt at a serious go at doing some widefield.
Cygnus had just started to appear over the trees around 2am so I replaced my scope with just the Canon and the nifty fifty.

This is concentrating on Deneb, I'm just starting to get some of the gas coming through from the pelican but I need more subs, stretching this one any further creates a right mess !

Spent ages trying to find the right combo of exposure etc, another learning curve.................

7x180 sec lights, F4.5, iso 800, DSS, CS6
Canon 550d 50mm on HEQ5Pro, guided with PHD2 and Opticstar ed80s



Any pointers to improve next time would be greatly appreciated

Cheers
Lee

[Scott]

For 21 minutes, I think it's a cracker. more data I guess would be the biggest help but at this time of yr, not so easy .

[wxsatuser]

Thats not to bad, as above, more subs.

The right exposure for a dslr is to get the data out of the read noise and not to blow the highlights.

The limiting factor will be how bright the sky is at the time.

Set your aperture and iso.......take test exposures and look at the in camera histogram.

The peak of the histogram whats to be in the range of 20>40%.

I normally try to get mine at 20%, imo thats best for my 60Da.

Is your 550d modded as I would have thought you would pickup more nebula.

You could open up more, depends how good you want your stars etc.

[leemanley]

Thanks Aus, your right, I did'nt realise just how light it was that time of night !

Thanks WX, i'll take a look at the histogram on the camera out of interest, never thought of using it on the night that would have made things a lot easier. The camera is unmodded at the mo, its something I've been thinking about for quite a while.

Cheers Lee

[Kirscovitch]

I love widefield shots of the night sky. I need to take more of them.

[wxsatuser]

Thanks Aus, your right, I did'nt realise just how light it was that time of night !

Thanks WX, i'll take a look at the histogram on the camera out of interest, never thought of using it on the night that would have made things a lot easier. The camera is unmodded at the mo, its something I've been thinking about for quite a while.

Cheers Lee

I thought so.

If it were modded you would no doubt have quite a bit more red in there.

Anyway it's quite a nice image even without the red.

[leemanley]

Thanks for your comment, I'm currently looking at an astromodded 1100d, better not tell the Mrs. !

[todd8137]

Nice work for the time ,best to get what you can it never really gets that dark till autum

Pat

[leemanley]

I'm down to around 4 useable hours here, could be worse I could live nearer the pole !

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Looking good. Might be worth opening up the aperture a bit more, I've seen some very good 50mm images taken at f4.

[leemanley]

Thanks Knight I'll try that tonight, would be a good idea to take a quick note what settings work and dont whilst I'm doing it, should have done so at the time !