M81/M82 and Comet C/2017 T2

[Littleguy80]

At the beginning of the month my wife bought me a Canon 250D DSLR for my birthday. I've always enjoyed taking photos through the eyepiece for some fun. I bought the Baader T-Ring so I could use the Canon with my scopes. I've been playing around to learn how to capture some images and process them. Over the weekend I decided to have a go at M81/M82 and Comet C/2017 T2. Here's my cobbled together process. I used my Equinox 80 refractor. I figured out I could take 1 second exposures without star trails. I don't have a tracking mount so I'm a bit limited. I set the camera to take 10 consecutive images on M81/M82. Finding them manually through the camera was quite tricky! Next I moved up to the Comet's position. I increased exposure time to 1 and a third seconds for this and took another 10 images. I'm a Mac user so my processing software options are a bit more limited. I used the Canon Digital Photo Professional software to convert the RAW CR3 files into TIF's. I then used Siril to stack them. After that, it was Pixelmator to fiddle with the levels and stitch the two images together. I manually aligned them and I think, hopefully, that I got it right. For my first try at something like this, I'm pretty pleased with the result. The dark lane in M82 is my favourite part. I was also pleased that NGC 3077 put in an appearance. I've seen much better images of this but I'm happy to have an image to call my own. Any suggestions for future improvements gratefully received

 

[scarp15]

Lovely wide field capture, collectively they each resonate clearly Neil and is relatable to observational circumstance. Perhaps next time post on Imaging Wide Field, may pick up more response for developing this further, which based upon this outcome will be interesting. 

[Littleguy80]

51 minutes ago, scarp15 said:

Lovely wide field capture, collectively they each resonate clearly Neil and is relatable to observational circumstance. Perhaps next time post on Imaging Wide Field, may pick up more response for developing this further, which based upon this outcome will be interesting. 

Thanks Iain. I thought it was quite close to the appearance through the eyepiece too. Good suggestion on posting in the imaging section. I did go back and forth on where best to post.