Bizibilder's first ever wide field

[Bizibilder]

I finally managed to get out last night with the new 1000D and a clear sky!! So I piggy-backed it onto the HEQ5 and managed 10 x 3min subs plus 4 darks through an (old!) Carl Zeiss 50mm f2.8 lens (on the assumption that this may be better than the supplied 18-50 zoom?? ). The central(ish) star is Deneb (Cygnus) and North at the top - you can see the North American Nebula quite clearly.

So - I've just spent a couple of hours trying to process the darn things!! - I used ASIGN obsy's Image stacking Guide for DSS and Making every Photon Count for the rest of the processing (Can you tell that I don't know what I'm doing with this new fangled digital stuff .

Attached are the final images - The upper one is my second - much preferred, attempt at the data. The lower one is my first ever attempt! - not so good? Comments PLEASE!!!

P.S. All processing done on JPEGS although I did save RAW as well - I just don't know what to do with them yet!!

[Psychobilly]

DSS will stack and calibrate the raws if you also give it darks, bias and flats (or sort of Calibrate it if you dont give it everythign it wants/needs) ... it will output a tiff file and you should use this as your starting point in you Image processing app...

[Bizibilder]

Thanks Psychobilly - I've got the darks and bias but can't get flats at the moment - I'll give it a try without them anyway. Thanks

[Bizibilder]

I've just had a try at processing the RAW images - using DSS and GIMP - comments please!!

[Cloudwatcher]

I've had a quick go at darkening the background in photoshop..... heres the result..... still needs work but details improved I think.

[Bizibilder]

Thanks Cloudwatcher. I'm limited to GIMP for processing - I'll see if can get somewhere near to your result!