First widefield and plea for help...

[Digz]

Ok guys, here come the stupid questions.

On Friday, I tried my hand at AP for the first time and whilst I came away with reasonable images of the moon and Jupiter but my widefield has suffered. So Im hoping for a little advice?

Below is my first attempt. This was taken with my D200 piggybacked on my scope. Its a combination of 4 frames (I imagine this is no where near enough) at roughly 3mins each. ISO 200 f/8 at 50mm.

The images were stacked in DSS - which in itself I have a load of questions!!!! Namely the DSS image was washed out but the autosaved tiff was better - is this right?

Processed in CS4 but Im left with a nasty red hue (light pollution from Bristol) which I want to get rid of. So my questions primarily are:

1. How can I improve this shot and remove the LP? Is this best done with a LP filter? Are there any techniques in photoshop?

2. How are my camera settings? I imagine more subs are ideally needed?

Image one:

Image two (converted to B&W and labelled):

Any general tips and tricks are also welcome.

Thanks for looking.

EDIT: To add, no flats, bias or offset frames have been added, this will be to follow! Baby steps, baby steps, lol

[Demonperformer]

First tip: get hold of a copy of "Making Every Photon Count" ... full of useful info, and it does not assume you know a load of stuff before you start.

[Digz]

I DP, thanks for the input, I already have this book and have read it forwards, backwards and upside down, its a great book.

BTW I was out last night and got on a whole lot better, Ill post some images later.

[JonH]

You've got a shed load of red there Digz that can be partly corrected in the red channel in curves. I'm a newbie to AP so I'll leave it to others to comment on LP filters and settings for widefield.

I will add, however, that curves is an extremely powerful tool in PS and well worth the effort in learning how to use it to it's full potential. Primarily it's used for the following - to correct colour balance, add/remove colour bias, increase/decrease contrast and also for lightening/darkening. And always use it as an adjustment layer to avoid degrading the original image!

Good luck with your imaging, I'm taking baby steps in AP too!

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Jon

[Digz]

Hi Jon, appreciate the feedback.

I do know about curves as I use them for my photography but it looks like I need to swat up some more as it looks like you've done a good job at removing the red!!! I must admit I only use them for contrast tweaking.

Its great fun this AP lark isnt it

[JonH]

You're welcome Digz.

I'm a photographer and a large chunk of my post production is done using the various functions in curves.

The weather looks good this week so maybe we'll get to practise a little!

Cheers,

Jon

[Digz]

The weather certainly does look good. In fact I was out last night trying DSO's with better success than the wide field above