A little Improvement Tonight

[Tim99]

Beautiful clear skies tonight.  Took the 80mm Refractor and CGEM to "The Hill."  This time, I took my time and tried to be as accurate as possible on my Polar Alignment & Two Star Align etc.  This time I chose the Andromeda Galaxy in the Go-To menu and the telescope slewed to it perfectly!  I was so pleased to finally get a good alignment. 

I don't have an auto-guider yet and the mistake I made tonight was pushing my exposure to 120 seconds.  It was too much, I'm afraid.  I had nice round stars at 90 seconds and should have stayed with that.

I am making some progress and having a great time anyway!  

Nebulosity is a fine program for capturing.  I will work on the fine focus a little more next time.

[D4N]

That's looking good!

I assume you don't have a flattener? That would explain why one side is more trailed than the other if it is field curvature and trailing combined.

Clearly you are getting good at aligning which is on of the trickier things to learn.

/Dan

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[laudropb]

Nice work. Thanks for posting.

[spaceman_spiff]

Great Pic, nice detail of the dust lanes! That ED refractor is a faster scope, which brightens up the image. You probably don't need an exposure as long as 120s anyway. If you take a chain of pictures each at 90 s exposure then stack them, you should get a really nice image. Don't forget to take calibration frames - darks, bias and flats. That said, it looks like the picture already has reasonably a flat field illumination.  

[Feral Rabbit]

Lovely attempt Tim,

Which camera did you use for the capture?

Wish our weather would clear up here so I can get out and attempt the Andromeda Galaxy. So want to try out my Skywatcher Star Adventurer and newly modded Canon.

Clear Skies

[Tim99]

Good morning everyone.  Now I see why people use the 80mm refractor for DSO work..  I plan to buy an auto guider for that scope.  Any suggestions?  I used the Canon 1100d (unmodded) and Nebulosity to capture and stretch etc. (still a lot to learn with that program.)  I discovered Nebulosity while looking for Astro-programs for the iMac.  Then, I decided to buy an inexpensive PC to use out in the cold and dew and Nebulosity allows you to use the program on both computers with the same license.  No experience with other programs but this one has a slick focusing feature that I will pay closer attention to next time.

Thanks for the suggestion on 90 second exp.  I had it in my head that "longer is better."  In the case of Andromeda, the 120 S exposure really blew out the center.  Would a shorter exposure help that situation?

Field flattener - I remember running across that term early on and thinking I will return to that later.  Cant remember how that is used.  haha.  Do you see why my head hurts sometomes?  LOL

Next subject: Processing.  I don't have PhotoShop.  I've been an avid photographer over the years but have used minimal processing on my photos.  After preprocessing this photo in Nebulosity, I used my photo program on my iMac (iPhoto) to fool around with exposure, contrast etc.  I can see that processing is what Astrophotography is all about and I need to start considering how to proceed in this regard.  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Oh!  What a wonderful adventure I have begun!

Thanks again,

Tim   

[D4N]

Yeh nebulosity is a good program and the licence working on Windows and OSX is really nice if you want to capture in Windows and process in OSX.

You can merge shorter exposures for the core and long ones for the dust trails in post processing.

I use gimp, you can get a reliable 2.9 build from www.partha.com

Don't use the 2.8 version from gimp.org as the 8 bits per channel limit in 2.8 will destroy your fine detail.

The flattener goes between the camera and the scope, it needs to be a precise distance from the sensor to work correctly. This will remove the hyperdrive effect for the stars.

I would suggest an asi120 for a guide cam if you go that way, this will also work great for planetary on your other scope.

If you decide to use both scopes for DSO's then I would suggest an OAG as this would let you easily transfer between scopes and will solve a lot of problems for the SCT. It is a bit overkill for the ED80 but would work well for both.

The colour camera would be simpler for planetary as you won't need filters but the mono is more sensitive for guiding. The choice would depend on your priorities.

/Dan

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[Pete Presland]

Nice start good to hear you are making progress.