Using my dslr for imaging giving me a headache

[barrie greenwood]

Hi guys I'm using my nikon dslr d90 .

So the other day when it was cold I took around 500 images at 30 second exposures and stacked them in Dss .

No flats darks only lights .

The reason it was only lights is when I used the flats darks etc it made the issues worse anyway this is a screen shot of the resulting stack .

I had used apt dither but still ended up with banding lines down the image. 

And that glow over the horse head is glow not a reflection and ive not a clue where that came from .

Any thoughts on trying to sort this out

Best regards Barrie

Edited November 30, 2021 by barrie greenwood

[michael8554]

Hi Barrie

Screen shots are not a good source for quality assessments.

Post a JPEG of your stack, using the "Drag files here to attach, or choose files" button in the reply options.

How much did you Dither ? Walking Noise is very apparent.

21 hours ago, barrie greenwood said:

when I used the flats darks etc it made the issues worse

Then show us a Flat and a Dark as they are supposed to improve the images :-<

Michael

 

[carastro]

It's always a struggle at the beginning.  

Firstly 30 secs with a DSLR is not going to show a lot and you have needed to stretch the image quite a lot to reveal detail, but it also reveals the flaws.  However if you are not guiding at the moment then that's probably the best you can do.  

Banding can be quite common with DSLRs.

Quote

And that glow over the horse head is glow not a reflection and ive not a clue where that came from .

If you are referring to the plnk glow above the horses head, that is normal, and part of the Ha "curtain" behind that head.

What I can see apart from the lack of flats is the mishapen stars getting longer radiating from the middle of the image (ish).  This shows that the spacing is not right.  Presumably you are using either a flattener or a focal reducer and these have a defined distance between your sensor and the lens in the reducer/FF.

If it is any consolation, my first horsehead looked very similar to yours.

Carole  

[malc-c]

Are you stacking the RAW image files or the corresponding JPEGs ?  - If you are stacking JPEGs these are already compressed and so you would be stacking the compression artefacts as well.

As the more experienced imagers have said, darks and flats are needed as they get used in the process to reduce the background noise and clean up the images.  Again, if you are using JPEGs this may be the reason they didn't give the results you expected?