June 18th to August 1st - x45 Consecutive Daily Observations - I'm not counting todays effort!!

[DrRobin]

7 hours ago, Iainp said:

Ha, I know what you mean. Ridiculous that I have a lovely 80mm Lunt gathering dust because I have no way of supporting it, even to take a quick look at the sun! (The 10" Meade scope is fork mounted). I'm started to get into the technical side of deep sky imaging just now, (flats, darks etc) and it's all very exciting but some of those really wonderful images people post on the deep sky forum here are the result of 20+ hours of data collection, and goodness knows how much time on post processing. Do I really want to go there?? Not sure...

Iain 

My experiences of long DSO exposures are that you throw away more frames than you keep, either the mount has drifted slightly, the exposure was wrong, a plane or meteor came through, too much cloud, or you just had the scope out of focus.  Then for every hour of lights (which might be luminance, RGB) you also need flats and darks.  Prior to getting an obs I tried to get everything done in one night, it was too much hassle trying to get everything the same a second night.  With an obs, it is much easier and several nights work can be easily combined.

In comparison solar imaging, even mosaics are relatively straight forward and it's light if you drop anything on the floor.

Robin

[paulastro]

6 hours ago, bunnygod1 said:

I do love solar imaging and the winter dark skies. I know what you mean I do frequently trawl a few country lanes/lay buys due to the low sun. 

Likewise Peter, I know all the best vantage sites within about 5 miles for catching the sun rising and setting throughout the year.