M64 Attempt

[The-MathMog]

I was out a couple of nights ago, mainly to test out my in-door setup for taking pictures, after acquiring cables for powering the DSLR, data transfer from DSLR to PC, and telescope control. It works out great, only nickle I have with it is the focusing aspect, as I have to run in and out to check it. Need to figure that out.

But oh well, I figured that I'd try shooting one of my favorite galaxies, the "Black Eye Galaxy". It's been one of my favorite ever since I saw the hubble photo of it, making it literally look like a "corrupt" galaxy. I had several issues, both with focusing, proper balancing of the mount, dew on the secondary mirror and accidentally deleting my alignment, so out of the over 100 pictures that I took, I only ended up using 30 of them for this picture (Seriously how many satellites pass through that area of the sky?!). But I was pleasantly surprised to see, that I could pull as much out of it as I could!

I need to figure out, how I can train my mount for PEC with my DSLR too, before I have to throw more money into gear, letting me guide.

30 Subs
1 Minute Exposure
6400 Iso
25 Dark Frames
Baader 2.25x Barlow (Focus Reasons)
Nikon D5200
Celestron Nexstar 130 SLT OTA
Celestron AVX Mount
Photoshop CS2 (Both Stacked and processed. I find that I can often get better results there, rather than stacking in DSS)

 

[The-MathMog]

I've been processing away, trying to figure out the do and don't's. I find myself doing a dozen renditions and crops, having a hard time figuring out which I like the best. This is what I've come up with so far. Any thoughts on it would be very appreciated, and maybe also touching on when you guys know that you've been "over-cooking" your images. 

[Notty]

I think that is rather amazing for such a small target with only 30 mins data!  Unusual to use a Barlow though, that might not be helping the star trailing at such short exposures?

[The-MathMog]

19 minutes ago, Notty said:

I think that is rather amazing for such a small target with only 30 mins data!  Unusual to use a Barlow though, that might not be helping the star trailing at such short exposures?

Thank you, glad you think so. I would've used more data, but as mentioned, I had to throw out sooo many subs because of many different reasons (mainly by my own faults). Tracking was actually surprisingly good, and it mostly seemed to be periodic errors that made quite a few of the frames have weird star wiggles.

I would remove the barlow too if I could (only using the lens part, to minimize the magnification), but the 130 SLT OTA was obviously not designed with astrophotography in mind, so the only way of currently achieve focus is with said barlow :/ I want to move the mirror up the tube at some point, but the screws etc that I need are surprisingly hard to find around here.