Most of what you need to know for DSO imaging

[Thalestris24]

Thought I'd just post this Craig Stark overview of DSO imaging principles for amateurs. It's a handy reminder of whys and wherefores. No doubt some things are open to debate...

Louise

[Bass007]

Thanks

[SonnyE]

Thanks Louise! I almost made it, but saturated about 80% through.  Pretty good for me, actually. I'll bookmark it for repeating as I need the info as I progress.

I offer the following to any other budding star gazers along the learning curve.

I suppose there is a term for the way I learn and become proficient doing something. I have to do over my mistakes until I finally get by a mistake, or onto the next step. I learn best in a nontechnical way, some of the most technical things. I'm mechanical learner, have been since childhood. Each facet to where I am in my Astro-imaging to date has been rough spot to negotiate along the learning curve. Not to mention equipment issues that were boulders rolling down on me. Still, I have persevered and continue to make my progress. And this in spite of my wanderings off, like the two plus months I beat my head against a wall trying to get Off-Axis Guiders to work with my 80mm Triple APO telescope. Finally, I got a small telescope to mount as it should be, and stumbled forward. Onward!

Mr. Stark's PHD was a major blockage on my climb up the lonely learning curve. It was anything but Push Here Dummy simple for me. Too many of the settings and complexities bewildered me. My successes were fleeting and occasional. I knew others were getting the program to work their guiding, but I needed help. Visual help. And I stumbled onto the following You-tube presentations that truly opened the door for me to the real world goodness PHD offers. PHD Basics Part #1 PHD Basics Part #2 and another about Drift Aligning in PHD which I have never used myself because I guess I stumbled on a method that has worked for me with my Celestron AVX mount and NexRemote virtual controller in my laptop. I do my 2+4 alignment stars, a post alignment Polar Alignment "fine tuning", PEC playback, and start selecting objects deep in space in Stellarium and pulling down my images in my crude but effective way.

I took the linked video's and watched them, then began applying them step by step by watching them, backing them up, freezing them on my desktop computer, while doing the settings on my laptop computer on the side. Things began working, finally. Then to reinforce them I did the settings back on my desktop computer. (Hoping one day to get the two remotely linked together. Which I have successfully acquired.)

Since it is easier for me, I gravitated to OSC imaging (One Shot Color). I bumbled along for a while shooting raw images, and wondering what to do with them. Then one night I tried YCbCr and RGB settings and finally stumbled onto a color image, of sorts. Here, finally approaching the second anniversary of my choice to enter this madness of Astrophotography I'm finally Guiding and Imaging like I had hoped to back then. Well, sort of...

I still can't stack any form of images I've taken. So I stack with time, as one friend put it. And every once in a while, even a blind mouse gets some cheese.

Thanks for posting the link, and for all your other helpful posts!