First DSO -- M57

[szymon]

My first ever DSO, the Ring Nebula.  Canon 6D with Explorer 200p on HEQ5.  23 light frames at 30 seconds iso 400, 9 darks and 20 flats, stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, cropped and tidied up a little using Aperture.

Needs more imaging time to get more detail, I have to buy myself an intervalometer!  Tracking on the mount (unguided) appears to take reasonable shots of around 2 minutes before trailing (tested using bulb), so I think I could get some reasonable data in future even before I start guiding.

[jambouk]

Great start. It's so rewarding to see something like that on your computer when you stack the image. Did you use a light pollution filter?

The 6D is a lovely camera. Personally i'd have gone for ISO 800 or 1600.

You can get cheap wired intervalometers off ebay for £10 or so. It helps. With your focal length i'd have though you could get your subs to 60 seconds+ if you tightened up the PA; have you tried using the polar alignment routine on the handset? It is pretty good.

You must be very pleased.

Well done. Looking forward to seeing the next.

Janes

[Phillyo]

6D is wonderful in low light and has a lovely large full frame sensor, I would definitely bump the ISO up to 800 or even 1600. Great first DSO though, well done

Phil

[szymon]

It was my first time polar aligning a mount, but I think I got it more or less right (thanks to huge amounts of research and instructions from AstroBaby and many others).  Goto's after two star alignment on Mizar and Vega were within the field of view of a 25mm eyepiece (I was actually quite impressed as to how close the first slew from the home position got to Mizar), although I star hopped from Vega to the Ring just for the pleasure of doing so.  I took a few images at 60 seconds which don't show trailing, by 90 seconds they do.  I need to learn about PEC and drift alignment and so on, but learning is a big part of the fun for me.  I don't own a Light Pollution filter, do you think it would make a huge difference?  I've learned from Photography that there's no such thing as a magic filter that'll fix everything, just specific filters which help in specific situations.

I have a Canon 50D which runs Magic Lantern, I think I might try using that on the next clear night as it has a built-in intervalometer and can take longer timed exposures.  The idea of setting it to just run by itself is appealing :-)

[jambouk]

You clearly don't have a lot of light pollution so i don't think you need a LP filter.

The accuracy of your polar alignment has no impact on the accuracy of your GOTO; and vice versa.

I have played with PEC, and i think if you are just doing unguided stuff, i think trying to teach the mount to do PEC can lead to just worse tracking.

Drift aligning isn't as hard as it sounds, just time consuming. Best if you have a set up you are not assembling / disassembling every night.

The handset routine for polar alignment is pretty good and can really tighten the PA to under 1 arcminute in each axis with a few cycles and only takes a few minutes (much easier with a reticle eye piece).

Janes

[szymon]

Ok, I've reprocessed it with the following changes:

- Doing the crop in DSS rather than post (which let me tune the colours better in DSS, as I could actually see the effect they have)

- Fine tuning the white balance, contrast and colour levels in Aperture

- Removed some of the unnecessary sharpening in the original image

I like it more, is beginning to bring out some of the colour and with the better contrast the star in the middle is visible.  What do you think?

[jambouk]

Loads more contrast, well done on the processing

The stars are not pin point, not sure if this is movement artefact from poor tracking, or from you pushing the shutter button, or if the focus is slightly off.

But great transformation of the data. Well done.

James

[theo]

Congratulations on your first deep sky image. I think you have done very well for a first attempt.

Pete

[szymon]

The stars can be improved on -- going through the lights I can see that some of them are streaking.  I was using a manual wired shutter release cable with mirror lockup and a good few seconds between lock and release, but I think I must have made things move in a few of the images.  I could probably reprocess with only the "good" ones if I get time (I do the processing while on conference calls when I'm not talking ;-)).

[bottletopburly]

great job i done ring nebula last week for first time its further down the threads and the dumbell last night ,keep up the good work

[szymon]

You clearly don't have a lot of light pollution so i don't think you need a LP filter.

You think so?  I think I have pretty bad LP!  Here's one of the raws this was taken from -- 30 seconds at iso400.

[jambouk]

There's LP and there's LP. That is nothing compared to mine!

I'd play more with seeing what you can achieve before getting a LP filter; you seem to have easily processed it out in your stacked image.

James

[jtlandreneau]

Hey ya got the central star! Great first shot, much better than my first attempt

[AstroGZ]

Great first image, very well done!