M33 Pinwheel galaxy

[Keithp]

Well that was my target last night. Originally I'd planned to have a go at a nebula but light cloud kept rolling in about 12 midnight and I had difficulty in tracking down any suitable targets.

I'm still new at this and as yet not autoguiding. I'm torn between going that way first or setting up goto to cut down on the time it takes to find targets. Mind you that's half the fun for me at the moment.

Finally settled on this, M33 the pinwheel galaxy, taken with 38 lights, and 6 darks at mainly iso 1600 at 45 secs each. There were one or two at 1 minute 30 but trails appeared, just a touch out on the PA.

Processing this was a pleasant surprise as the finished stacked picture showed no signs of the target, it wasn't until I got the tiff into PS that I got the detail out.

I really need to practice the post processing and wondered if anyone could tell me does Steve's book 'Making every photon count' go into detail about processing to the level of gaining an understanding of what processing does what? Pehaps Steve might answer when he's on line. I seem to be following different people's methods, seeing the results, but not really understanding what I am doing or need to do to bring out the best in different pictures.

Regards

All

Keithp

Feel free to comment please.

[Aza]

Looks like you got a lot of detail in there.

Processing takes a lot of time and practising, and following all the tutorials you can find.

The best ones I have seen so far are the ones at:

IP4AP - Your online source for Visual Learning

They are not free, but they are worth it to bring up your processing up to the next level.