My first Crab and another Orion from last night

[rikyuu]

After the bad weather, it was pleasing to have a clear night last night and managed to try the C80 ED for the first time. Visually, the stars are pin sharp, on a lovely black background. Very nice and much easier to mount than the 10"!!

Finally managed to track down the Crab nebula and had another go at Orion. Used the Meade DSI with a FR (F=300mm ~F/3.75). 7x30s subs. These are unguided and roughly polar aligned. Need to try out WCS next.

I keep getting very purple images from the DSI, had to us PS to adjust the colour. Anyone know why this could be?

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

Still couldn't get any nebulosity on M45, despite 60sec exposure, probably need in the order of 5 minutes I think.

[MartinB]

Other than the colour they look great. So much nicer working with small refractors than bit 10" scopes! Am I right in thinking you are using a colour DSI. Does it come with the software for debayering? When you debayer you sometimes have to use an offset so that the pixel colour is correctly interpreted by the software. I wonder if this is the problem here.

[philj]

They are OK images those, I had a DSI and just could not get anywhere near an image like those out of it so shifted to DSLR, I understand those

Phil

[rikyuu]

Hi,

Yes it's a colour DSI. I probably haven't got the best out of the DSI software as I'm still working out the controls, but it is a bit of a pain to use and it tends to change settings all the time, or if set to manual mode, it's difficult to get the right settings without the image just disappearing.

I don't have the debayer software, just the DSI s/w in the autostar suite. The original image was very purple and I had to use the 'auto levels' setting in PS (I'm not really an expert) which reduced the purpleness.

I'm wondering if some other s/w would be better which has more intuitive settings. Perhaps K3CCD would be worth a try.

Any advice would be very welcome.

Thanks

[MartinB]

Sorry Rik, I can't help you I'm afraid since I'm not really familiar with the DSIs

[RichieJarvis]

Nice to see it getting some use at last Lee!

K3CCD tools isn't bad with the DSI. Not sure whats causing the purple though - have you got the colour correction set somehow? There are 2 sliders at the top if I remember rightly - one for gain, the other for colour....

Good images though - nice one!

Cheers,

Richie

[rikyuu]

Thanks Richie, I think it's a good little camera with lots of potential. I've managed to fiddle with the settings a bit more now and getting a bit of a better understanding. Will keep working at it!! Will need to move onto the FITs file format to unleashe some more potential next.