First time astrophotography

[Marvin Jenkins]

Wednesday was blue skies and for once it did not cloud up by five pm. Decided to put the Nikon on my 150pds and have a go at taking my first DSO picture.

M31 is a single image of 180 seconds at ISO 800. I sent it to Bukko for critical examination and he very kindly asked his son to see if it could be tweaked a bit. A little bit more detail of the dust lanes became apparent.

Next opportunity I will try to grab a whole bunch of these and try a stack for the first time.

Marvin

[MrRotor]

Nice first DSO capture! ☝️

Stacking will take the photos further. It's fun to explore new processing techniques 😀

[Tommohawk]

That's a nice start!.

If you aren't guiding you might want to try shorter exposures and ISO 1600. If you stack enough you should lose most of the noise. Cant say for sure that works with a Nikon, but its fine with Canon.

[Marvin Jenkins]

No guide scope, just the mount and a careful polar alignment. I was planning on dropping the exposure time by half and trying to get at least an hours worth of subs and some darks. I am not great with computers but I have DSS on my laptop for stacking but don’t have the first clue about processing.

Thank you everyone for the kind comments. Marvin

[ollypenrice]

In focus, decent tracking... so all it needs is more. You'll be astounded by the improvement that comes with stacking many subs but some research on processing would be well worthwhile.

Olly

[Marvin Jenkins]

Thank you everyone. I must admit I did dance a little bit around the garden in the dark as I am sure many of you have done. I think it is the un planned nature of this as I was trying to iron out an alignment issue with the intention of star hopping to view T2 Panstarrs. For some reason I just couldn’t find my target and chose M31 as a target to see if the Goto was accurate.

As soon as I saw that monster in the ep I thought ‘chuck on the camera and see what happens’ I did the same with M42 and the colours blew me away but the centre is so burnt out I didn’t post it.

Funny thing is, I have sent both to non Astro friends and not one mentions M31 but days later they are still asking if the M42 is some kind of fake.

Once again thank you to Bukko and his son for there help and the advice about shortening the M42 exposure time.

Olly, I promise I will try to get up to speed on processing. Just got to get this pre computer brain to get in the new world.

Marv

[rickwayne]

It's really amazing, isn't it? I still haven't gotten over the thrill of seeing something appear on the screen.