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First go aiming in the direction of Orion.


BlueStinger

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Hi, I woke up at 0425 this morning for some reason and instead of going back to sleep I decided to look outside and noticed it was clear, so crazily thought it would be a good idea to image Orion for the first time. I knew time was against me before our own star would start to brighten the sky so got dressed and threw everything in the car and 10 mins later was out of town and under bortle 4 skies. I quickly set up, did a rough polar alignment and managed to get 30 minutes or so of exposure before packing up and heading home. A quick Sequator and Photoscape X later and I got this image. It's heavily cropped as the framing was poor (I'm so bad at framing), slightly our of focus and too green to name some of the faults but tomorrow I will have a proper go at it with Photoshop and Lightroom when I'm less tired and have more time. I'm very happy to see a very feint Barnard's Loop in there!

Unmodified 700D, 50mm F1.8 STM lens (@F2.8 and cropped) and a Minitrack LX3. 25x80secs and ISO200. Just lights because complete noob 😄

orioj-crop.jpg

Edited by BlueStinger
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That's an amazing image, well done. I'd be proud of that. With rough polar aligning like that it's brilliant, can't see any startrails and I'm a complete newbie as well. Love looking at and imaging Orion so much to see, I want to have a go at the horsehead nebula next. I like the look of your minitrak lx3, with its mechanism, does it just fit onto a standard tripod, could be a potential purchase for me. 😉

Edited by LeeHore7
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Thanks for the words of wisdom and support and the plugin tip. I didn't really know what stretching was and had to look it up. Before I've often wondered how pulling the image like elastic would help anything haha🤣 I've spent hours in photoshop today and watching videos and understanding more bit by bit. I have quite a few sets of images of various targets waiting for some decent attention. I'm determined to get better at it over this coming winter season.

As for the Minitrack yes it's a nice bit of kit and does indeed just fit on a tripod. I used it originally on a cheap pan head tripod but tightening everything down after alignment would always throw it off a fair bit so I bought a new tripod with a ball head. Locking everything down with that was better but was so fiddly I always felt I needed a third arm so I just bought a cheap mini wedge and this made things so much easier.

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