My first six weeks

[RSM]

It's been six weeks now since my first night in the back garden staring at the night sky through my scope. I have a Skywatcher 200PDS on a second hand HEQ5 Pro with Synscan. Spent several afternoons practicing with the polar alignment which I can now do in the dark. I posted an initial post on the site after my first attempt at imaging and received lots of useful advice. After reading all that and spending far too long looking at you tube tutorials, I decided to give Pixinsight a go. I'm currently running a trial version (45 days free with full support, full use and ability to save with out any watermarks, etc). I chose not to use PS which is widely used as I'm not a big fan of the way they charge for their software now, a sort of lease arrangement - I like to know I've made my outlay and from then on the software is mine. That said, PI is not cheap, and neither is it particularly easy, but with a couple of great tutorials (search for "Richard Bloch" & "Pixinisght" on Youtube to find a calibration/stacking and a basic image processing tutorial) I found my way through the first stages.

So what has the first six weeks got me from and to...

Well, the image below was my first, rather grainy image of M31 (Andromeda Galaxy) which I stacked with DSS and processed in GIMP.

I was very happy with this as a first go, could see some of the dust lanes and definite core to the galaxy. (Wow, I can image a galaxy from my backyard!). After that, realising that with my 200PDS, I was not going to be able to get all of M31 into a single frame, I took a set of four lots of subs and tried to mosaic together. My first go at that (again with GIMP)  yielded...

Not very impressive! Not put off, that's when I turned to Pixinsight. I have a Macbook Pro running a core i7 processor which thankfully eats big image files for breakfast. Along with the you tube tutorials I mentioned, plus another from Steve Allan (Catanonia) about mosaic blending and one from Harry Page showing me how to remove difficult gradients using the DBE function in Pixinsight (six weeks ago this, level of detail would have had me running!) and I was starting to get excited. These changes resulted in the following two images:

Hopefully you can see the detail in these smaller file size PNGs. The originals are huge image files with buckets of detail which I have had to reduce to upload and I've tried to get them to a point where they are upload able without degrading them too much. These are both the result of about 30-40 x 45 second subs at ISO 1600 for each element of the four part mosaic, calibrated with Darks, Flats and Bias. They were shot on an unmodded Canon 500D in RAW format. They were calibrated and stacked in Pixinsight before being blended into a mosaic and then image processed, again in Pixinsight. They were taken from my back garden in Surrey - 25 miles from London - with all the light pollution, hence the need for the background gradient to be removed, but thankfully not too far from a hot cup of tea!

I have a few other images I've created of the Globular Cluster in Hercules, the Double Cluster and some images of a nearly full Moon (stacked with Autostakkert2 and wavelet processed in Register 6), but due to the site constraints for adding images, I will need to create another post to upload those.

Two things, first I'd be glad and would love to get any feedback, comments or thoughts on my attempts. Second, I guess what I wanted to share was that with a bit of effort, using the comments and support of the friendly folk here on SGL together with those who have taken hours to post tutorials on the web, that results can be obtained, even if your first attempts don't result in the sort of images those with darker skies than me post regularly here on SGL. I've learned a lot from SGL and look forward to learning more and more in the coming weeks, months and years and I guess I wanted to give some encouragement back to those who, like me, are just in their infancy of getting cold outside on frosty nights.

After a couple of weeks of windy, cloudy and rainy nights (can you believe I was ill on the only clear night in ages last weekend!!!) I'm yearning for more views of the heavens and am looking forward to having M42 firmly in my sights over the coming weeks. Seeing the John Lewis ad for the first time this evening made the pangs worse.

Thanks for reading - roll on the clear skies.

Richard 

[mert]

Hi Ricard, I know very little about imaging but they look superb.

[RSM]

Thanks for the kind comments Mert

[wimvb]

Great progress!

Hope to see more of your backyard views in this forum.

[Ouroboros]

Amazing progress in 6 weeks. Well done!

[wxsatuser]

Not bad for 6 weeks, I'm still learning after two years.

Unfortunately the software is never yours, however you pay for it.

[hjw]

Those are really good images for pretty short exposure times. Amazing what good processing can do to your efforts. I would love to give Andromeda a shot, however it never gets higher than 10° above the horizon.

I would love to see what you can do once you get to guiding.

Keep it up!

HJ

[D4N]

Nice work especially good considering you are close to London!

/Dan

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Stu]

Fabulous progress and lovely images Richard. I'm not an imager so can't give you any advice, but it's great to read your story and I'm sure it will be a huge encouragement to other new starters.

[Pete Presland]

Fantastic progress thank you for sharing your journey! Some really good detail in the images.

[Astrosurf]

Oh boy, if only I'd made that kind of progress in 6 weeks! Excellent.

Alexxx

[Feral Rabbit]

Lovely pictures. Well done. It's what I aspire to do if the weather would just break so I could get out..... and preferably on a night when I don't have work commitments.

Regards

[RSM]

Thanks for the nice comments. I agree with you on the weather. Been rubbish recently. Forecast was for it to clear up overnight last night (perfectly clear this morning!!!). I went outside around 10pm and it was crystal clear here with dark skies as no moon. Did my quickest set up yet (actually one of my best, must be due to my aligning the reticle in my polar scope the other day[emoji6]) had five minutes in the Pleiades which looked superb before the clouds rolled back in. Guess that sounds familiar to many!!

[Tim99]

Thanks for the post, Richard.  I like to read what other people are doing and what they are using for equipment etc. Nice pics and progress you have made.  You are right about how great people are here at SGL. 

[tomato]

Hello Richard, that is brilliant progress in 6 weeks. I remember having an astronomy book as a kid called "The Universe'" and there was a photo of the Andromeda Galaxy in it taken with the Mt Palomar 200 inch telescope and honestly your final image attachment is just like it!

Great Stuff

Steve

[RSM]

Thanks Steve, that's praise indeed. I just find it amazing that I can compile these images from what I shoot in my back garden.