M42, first attempt.

[hornedreaper33]

Hello all. It's been a while since I have been on here but I was super excited to get the telescope out last night. It's not very often Vancouver permits this in the winter. 

I had a quick observing session and while looking at M42 I decided to throw the DSLR on to see what I could get. I very roughly aligned as I wasn't expecting to be out long and this is a simple 30 second exposure at ISO800, but I was pleased with the result.

I took a handful of images so I'm going to have a go at stacking a few and seeing what I get but, with this as a start, what would the first suggestions be for improvements? I have plans to get a better finder scope, guide camera, Starlight Instruments focuser eventually but that's about $1000 away.

This was taken using a Canon Rebel T6 on a Celestron C8 with Advanced AVX mount.

 

Thank you.

[vlaiv]

Stacking will improve things considerably in terms of "depth" of image.

Couple of things spring to mind for improvements:

- collimate the scope better - coma visible in the image is not "symmetric" and it should be to minimize it's impact (stars in the bottom right corner could be less affected if coma was equally spread over FOV).

- at this pixel size you are oversampling. When you start using software like DSS to stack images, there are couple of things that you can do about this. Hopefully you took raw subs instead of jpegs. DSS allows for raw files and under settings for debayer - choose super pixel mode. When you are done stacking subs and start post processing - you can further bin your image x2. This will make rather small image, size will be 864x1296, so larger than it is currently displayed in this thread, but "depth" of image will further be increased - you will be able to bring even more details to view in processing and stars will be "properly" sized (now when you look at image at full size stars are large circles rather than tiny dots).

- Do you know how to take flats? There is dust shadow in the image and removing it with flats (together with vignetting or any other thing that might be there - you will see after stacking) would improve it.

[hornedreaper33]

Thanks for the reply @vlaiv.

I spent a lot of time last night researching calibration frames and how best to take them. Also, the OTA was shipped to me in the UK and I brought it with me when I moved to Canada so I guess I might have to look at the collimation. Another thing was the camera not being set to RAW. Thanks for the reminder.

What do you mean by oversampling?