First pics fom new location

[Uranium235]

Here are the first couple of pics ive managed to get from my new (darker sky) location. After a few initial annoyances (power problems to mount) I got 45min on both M42 & M51. It was immidiately obvious that the amount of light pollution was less, I was surprised I got so much more detail and colour on M51 than I did last time

M51: 16x180s light, 4x180 dark, 10 bias, 10 flat

M42: 20x120s light, 8x120s dark, 10 bias, 10 flat

Shame it was a week night, otherwise I would have stayed out all night

[MartinB]

A dark sky makes things so much easier. Great star colour in the M51 image. How dark are your skies now?

[Psychobilly]

Darker skies help a lot....

Both nice but loads of Detail in the M42 shot...

[Uranium235]

A dark sky makes things so much easier. Great star colour in the M51 image. How dark are your skies now?

Heh... no more dark skies at the moment just endless cloud & rain! But it was definitely worth the move. One day I hope to get a powertank and go a few miles down the road (probably Wyre Forest area) where it should be uber-dark, its just a case of getting the wheels (i dont drive).

I really had to fiddle with DSS to get the colour though, becuase for some time the end product to all my pics was always coming out very "grey". That was until i turned off all RGB channel calibration and used the saturation slider a bit (+25%), the colour just jumped out!... was it a lucky shot or is that what the saturation shift slider is for? Anyways, I saved the setting for future use.

Oh btw.... Stellarium... its sooo useful when setting up calibration stars! Wish id tried it earlier!