A few firsts for me. M42, Flame and Horse Head

[gman]

Hi, been a while since i posted anything here. I've made my first attempts at imaging nebulae this weeks.

The first image is a stack of five 20s unguided subs of m42 with all the darks etc sorted. I took them a few days back. Given the short exposure time I'm pretty chuffed with the results.

Number two is from a single guided five minute exposure (no darks taken since i wasn't expecting anything useful) of the Flame and Horse Head nebula. I didn't take any more subs due to there being quite a bit of light pollution in the image. Instead I moved on to M45, which i ended up regretting since phd ended up struggling with the dec axis. I spent an age fiddling but called it a day when the battery gave up on my laptop. I'm pretty surprised with the result of the second image. I managed to get rid of the ugly orange hue and managed to get an acceptable (by my standards) image.

I'll definitely be tackling both targets again in the near future. I'm still very much the novice when it comes to imaging (esp. processing) so constructive criticisms quite welcome.

Images were taken using an EOS 350d on a WO ZS70 all sat on an EQ3-2 (with diy mods and a gpusb for guiding). Stacking and processing were done using DSS, PSP10 and GIMP.

Gareth