Having difficulty capturing m31 with my dsi

[stepping beyond]

This is how it looks after I've dropped the screen with the slider, I've finally got my guiding good enough for over a min. exposure , a little time to get some thumbscrews for the polar scope and bamm "worked like a charm" . I was grinning from ear to ear to find that it wasn't the mount but, the polar scope all this time and a $7 fix and I was guiding all night.  This 0001  last years and 0030 Friday night is a practice frame for when m31 is higher , should I keep them light or drop the gain a bit? . I've  stacked last year data in the hope that it'll be worthy of combining for a nice image .  Any advice from the more experienced imagers will kick me like a can down the road a bit. I've still got to find where I had position the camera last year because my mark is lost in all my scribings on the tube.

[ollypenrice]

The galaxy is very extended so with the small chip at your focal length you won't be able to frame all of it by any means. You'd need to do a multi panel mosaic to fit it all in and that might be a step too far at this stage?

When it comes to adding data at later dates the biggest favour you can do yourself  is to get into the habit of running your camera square on to RA and Dec. (Sometimes an object just won't let you do this but that's rare.) It's dead easy to align a camera this way, in landscape or portrait as you prefer. Simply take a 5 second sub and, during that sub, slew slowly on one axis. This will create a straight line star trail at the camera's angle to the axis on which you slewed. Rotate the camera and repeat till the star trail is horizontal or vertical. Then any time you want to add more you put the camera back in that orientation.

Olly

[stepping beyond]

Is this a good start , I tried to keep m110 in the frame also to add the immense size for comparison "it's just a screen grab of a 60s exp.. When you say multi panel , you're referring to more than one?

[ollypenrice]

9 hours ago, stepping beyond said:

Is this a good start , I tried to keep m110 in the frame also to add the immense size for comparison "it's just a screen grab of a 60s exp.. When you say multi panel , you're referring to more than one?

Yes, it's what tends to be called a Panorama in daytime imaging. We call them mosaics in astro imaging, out of habit. Beware of the fact that they can get out of hand, which is how Tom O'DOnoghue and I ended up with a 400 hour 35 panel mosaic of Orion...

Olly

 

[stepping beyond]

Thanks Olly my dsi is going to the doctor to see if he can fix the issue of it wanting to connect and disconnect and malfunction, this w10 OS on my Asus i5 is really a painfor the older cams and programs. Maybe for xmas I'll get a Mallincam and really start to take off in long exposure astrophotography instead of waiting for a fossil of a camera to decide it wants to work. When it does work it's" game on" as we say in the states.  Here's some mono grabs derotated in pipp when the cam is working correctly no calibration and mono and lrgb is the way to roll in my book , it's just more time consuming and harder for my handicapped --- to accomplish but, the results at the end of the process  are priceless. SB