First ever photos - Cygnus, Cassiopeia

[MadFish]

Hi, 

Finally got to do some imaging : Nikon D3300 w 35mm prime on a star adventurer mount. 

4 x 60sec (ish) exposures and dark frames stacked using GIMP. Just fiddled with processing as no idea what I am doing- any advice appreciated.  I aimed in the general direction of Cygnus. I am a bit disappointing with the colours, its either red (i assume light pollution as I live in the middle of town) or washed out as it is presently. Lots of distortion on the  edges -seems to be the lens.

the Cassiopeia shot is a single 50second (ish) exposure before the cloud came in, i like it just because it has Andromeda and the double cluster in it

Some clouds also made an appearance!!

All resized to speed upload..

All comments welcome. 

 

 

denebresize.tif

cass11-9.tif

[wimvb]

Very nice images. You managed to capture the North America Nebula on the first image, and the Andromeda galaxy and the double cluster on the second image.

That's a great first result.

Did you really stack in GIMP??

[MARS1960]

Very nice, much better than my first widefield attempts.

[Andywilliams]

very nice images.....I think you can be very happy with them.....great sharp focus.

[MadFish]

2 hours ago, wimvb said:

Very nice images. You managed to capture the North America Nebula on the first image, and the Andromeda galaxy and the double cluster on the second image.

That's a great first result.

Did you really stack in GIMP??

Yes, I stacked the 4 exposures and a dark frame in layers. I tried deep sky stacker but could never get a decent looking result, probably need to work out what I'm doing with it. 

I had to convert the RAW's with Rawtherapee and the could import them to GIMP. I don't know how to post-process colours at present. 

Thankyou for the comments  

[wimvb]

You can do a lot of processing in RawTherapee, including dark subtraction, flat field correction, hot pixel removal and stretching. With flat field correction, you can get rid of some if not all of the vignetting that is in you images. But you probably already knew that.

[MadFish]

On 12/09/2016 at 17:59, wimvb said:

Very nice images. You managed to capture the North America Nebula on the first image, and the Andromeda galaxy and the double cluster on the second image.

That's a great first result.

Did you really stack in GIMP??

Yes, I stacked the 4 exposures and a dark frame in layers. I tried deep sky stacker but could never get a decent looking result, probably need to work out what I'm doing with it. 

I had to convert the RAW's with Rawtherapee and the could import them to GIMP. I don't know how to post-process colours at present. 

Thankyou for the comments  

22 hours ago, wimvb said:

You can do a lot of processing in RawTherapee, including dark subtraction, flat field correction, hot pixel removal and stretching. With flat field correction, you can get rid of some if not all of the vignetting that is in you images. But you probably already knew that.

I had no idea. Thanks for pointing that out