Light Pollution

[Jase71]

Have an awful feeling that my desire (Mid life crisis?) for astronomy is running headlong into a brick wall before its got off the ground..

After my initial post in the welcome section,i decided to spend as much time as i could sat with my 5" newtonian.

Nowhere near as much clear skies as i'd hoped (along with the rest of you i guess!),but i did manage a few reasonable nights observing.

Even managed a rough polar alignment for first time,making Jupiter a doddle to keep in the view.

Was fairly mesmorised sat looking at the color bands,although they were very hard to distinguish.Im starting to realise half of it isnt about the view you have-but appreciating just what it is you are looking at considering distances/time involved.

However-I have a major problem.

I live perhaps 1.5 miles south of Heathrow airport.And generally no more than 10 stars readily visible most nights. (Limited to South - North westerly views only from the garden)

Tried on a couple of nights to have a bash at some long exposure widefields to see what it would bring out on my canon with 18mm and a 50mm f.18,and was massively dissapointed.(@18mm f5.6 had problems with needing a LOT of exposures to get anything at all-which resulted in problems due to being a static tripod setup-trails were awful,while at f1.8,exposures were down to a few seconds and still looking very bright,with little stars)

Would a better scope be able to increase the number of visible objects,kinda cut thru the LP at all?

Or would say a 200-300mm mirror simply mean more of the LP to look at?

I have street lights about 75ft from Obs location,and sky is never black. (oh how i wish!)

Anything i can do about it?-or is it simply a case of driving out to distant sites anytime i want to have a little gaze?

I love watching Jupiter,and the details on the lunar surface..but..

Need a little more to look at!

[Vega]

Taking a widefield shot from my location (from the edges of an average sized town), always gives me an orange canvas with some stars on it. However I quickly realised it can be fixed in Photoshop or Paintshop Pro quite easily. See these 30 sec example shots....

Casioppeia - Original image

Casioppeia (same image, tweaked in Paintshop)

For deep sky shots, I use an LP filter which makes the fixing even easier ;-). Its amazing just what detail you can bring out afterwards. All photos on my website (with the exception of a couple milky way widefields) were taken from my back garden which is surrounded by street lights. Dont loose heart mate ;-)

Cheers

Matt

[Jase71]

I'd be happy to get anywhere near that

Okies..

Think perhaps i been jumping ahead of myself a bit..

What i have been doing is getting the cam setup on tripod looking almost straight up (Lower alts just make it much worse),and starting with 30 second exposures,dropping exp time down as neccersary depending on lens used.Once i find a shutter speed that keeps sky reasonably dark while showing stars,i get my series of shots to be used,followed by a few dark shots with lens cap on.

I then simply use the default settings in Deep Sky Stacker to stack the images,and save the result with options embedded but not applied.

Open image in Photoshop and start playing with curves etc.

Problem is..

Until i saw your post-i had not been checking the original images before stacking. (Pretty stupid i know...)

But...Surprisingly..The original images have far more stars visible,with better detail than the stacked image does?

I was kinda hoping stacking would improve the visibility of faint stars-not simply exclude them from the image. (a single "original" image looks far better than anything i can get in photoshop from the stacked one!)

i did notice in DSS that there is an option for Star Detection threshold,set at 10 by default.

By dropping the value to 5,i found that DSS detected far more stars,but it made no real difference in the final image.

I'l get my head round it at some point no doubt