Testing the skywatcher star adventurer first time

[JohnPh]

Despite the full moon last night there were clear skies for the first time in a few weeks, so I had to get out and try out my newly acquired Skywatcher Star adventurer.  I'm a total noob to astronomy, but not photography, so I've tried to educate myself a little using Stellarium nightly, reading the forums and I'm on my second read of Making every photon count.

Polar aligning the mount was fairly straightforward, which is not what the manual would have you believe,  I used Polaralign for that.

I set it up with my canon 135L @ f/2.8, Iso 800 on the 5D3 to take a few subs of the Cassiopeia region and ended up with 60 x 30secs and also took 15 darks and 15 bias frames. 

I had awful trouble with DSS stacking the shots with the resulting tif file looking seriously washed out and no levels or curves adjustments in PS would sort it so I stacked the subs in Photoshop as a smart object and used the median filter for stacking the layers.  To my surprise the resulting picture looked ok and there was a cluster in the corner so here it is!  NGC7789, more luck than judgement but I'm very happy with it, fairly hefty crop.

Looking forward to getting my 550D modded now and grabbing the 200L for some nebulae

[brrttpaul]

Im relatively new to astronomy/astrophotography and had the SA about 6 months now, I find on DSS theres quite a few things you can do to bring out the detail better, there was a video on youtube i think about it, basically link the RGB then just tweak it slightly, I think you have done a good job as a first effort mind (widefield is brilliant with it)

[wxsatuser]

Good first light with the SA.

If the DSS image was washed out it may be the histogram and curve was in the wrong place.

This is roughly what it will look like when adjusted correctly.

Failing that just use the Autosave tif that DSS saves after stacking.

It's normally in the folder where your light subs are and is a 32bit file.

DSS histogram

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Congratulations on getting up and running. Unfortunately subs will wash out very quickly this time of year when using such a fast lens due to the lack of full astronomical darkness, but you're well placed to get some valuable practise in before darker skies arrive in the autumn.

[damnut]

Nice work John, been looking at this system for a while. Look forward to seeing more of your images.

[JohnPh]

Many thanks everyone.  I've only used DSS a few times before so I'll watch a few videos and persevere.  Roll on autumn as I have a couple of nice dark sites not too far away!

[brrttpaul]

The more you play with it the easier it becomes