Needing advice for better pics

[pshanahan]

Greetings,

I have had a great summer once I solved my dew problems with heaters and have taken some great pics.

I have a Meade LX 200 8 inch SC Reflecting scope and a Cannon EOS T5i DSLR camera. I rarely need more than 90 seconds to get a decent(my Definition) picture with ALT AZ guiding. Yet I see most Astrophotographers use very long exposures and equatorial mounts.

I bought a Meade 8 inch Wedge and have it on the way.

It seems long exposures with my cannon produce color graininess at higher ISO settings.

can anyone help with advice on how to get more detail and longer exposures without increased color grains. Now if I lower the iso I only see the stars. If too high big color swirls happen instead of defined Galaxies.

enclosed is a pic that looked better in the raw. iso 1600 exp 30 sec

[ollypenrice]

A  roughly 12 pixel dither between subs will greatly help reduce noise on DSLR images. I don't know about the best gain settings though.

If you can go for longer exposures you'll find all sorts of faint outlying features around most opbjects, and expecially nebulae like the Swan. https://ollypenrice.smugmug.com/Other/Best-of-Les-Granges/i-DnDNxQT/0/X3/EagleSwan%208HRS%20overlaysWEB-X3.jpg

I'd certainly look into autoguiding, though, because at your pixel scale even tiny errors will take out details you could potentially capture.

Olly