My first attempt at astrophotography

[Tony1967]

[Tony1967]

My first attempt  at astrophotography  using  a canon 6d and a a meade lx850,  had to collimate  my telescope  fist is that how the stars should  look  couldn't  get the focusing any better  than that

[kirkster501]

Well done, we all have to start somewhere.  You've got some nice stars on that image.  Onwards and upwards!

[Tony1967]

Thanks,  the scope  was out of collimation so it's my first attempt  at collimating a telescope  it's good  to  that there's some good stars there

[almcl]

You've captured stars down to Magnitude 15, which is pretty good, and it seems quite close to focus as there are diffraction spikes on Phi Per (the brightest star).  When stretched there's some nice colour in the stars, as well. Here's a quick stretch to show:

[Tony1967]

Thanks  any help  and advice  is much  appreciated. 

[orion25]

Nice first image, Tony! What were the settings on your camera?

Reggie

[Tony1967]

Not sure what the settings  were  I was just experimenting  I'll let you know later what the settings  are

[carastro]

Quote

any help  and advice  is much  appreciated. 

Good start, you have the camera working.  First bit of simple advice is for focus.  Get or make yourself a Bahtinov mask, it's a simple and easy way to know when you are in focus.  Your image above looks as though it's probably in focus, but why not be absolutely certain, and it's a simple way to know. 

Carole 

[Tony1967]

Thanks ,  I've ordered  a bahtinov  mask and waiting  for my pier to arrive  learning  one thing at a time at the moment . it's great to hear off others that my first photographs are good. I've made some progress since I first set the scope up and  tried  to take some photos 

[steve k]

Well done good start.. its a long learning curve but so rewarding when it starts to  come together..

[Tony1967]

Thanks  it's taken  me a few attempts  to get to this stage, image stacking and processing  will be a challenge  as I'm not the best with  computers so that's something else I'll have to learn.

[Tony1967]

Reggie my camera I so was set at 8000 and my exposure  time was  6 seconds. 

Tony

[George Gearless]

You're off to a good start. 

I sympathize with your apprehension towards learning various post production tools on a computer. To get the full benefit of your labours behind the camera/telescope, you will unfortuantely have to spend a great deal of time in front of your computer. But you can get a long way by just running your pics through the 'default' settings of a stacking program. Such as Deep Sky Stacker. Just by doing that, you get very presentable results.

I think I spent all of 7 mins on my first stack of 10 pictures and was delighted with the result. Even with that minor effort, it made a huge difference.