DSLR M31

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

While I was letting the Newt. do some images I set the D50 up on the HEQ5 on the end of the Celestron 80mm f/5 and aimed it at Andromeda.

Click for bigger as usual.

To get any kind of decent image I had to get rid of the red channel as there was nothing but noise in it. Then I had to change it to grayscale to get rid of the colour as it looked nasty.

Had a great time snapping away whilst watching the K3CCD preview screen and only forgot to zap the Nikon once.

This is 10 X 90 seconds stacked in Registax.

Captain Chaos

[richard42]

very cool how long was the exposure?

did you have a moon in your sky

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Richard, I did 10 exposures of 90 seconds each. ISO was 1600 BTW.

The seperate frames were then stacked together using Registax and the resulting image saved as a TIFF format file. This was then opened using Photoshop for more adjustments to get rid of vignetting and stretch the image some more.

The moon was coming up (this was last night).

HTH

Captain Chaos

[daz]

That's a nice one CC

Dust lanes are evident, and it might stand a bit more levelling in PS?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

After I've got my head round the best order to do the leveling and conversion to mono, I think I might have another bash at it. Its a very delicate thing this M31, too much and it just goes bleargh on you.

Thanks for the comments.

Captain Chaos

[daz]

Do you have Maxim?

You could use the DDP on it to smooth out the core

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

No I don't have Maxim yet. Might be on the shopping list though.

Captain Chaos

[moondog]

M31 is a tricky subject, but you nailed it with some nice dust lanes.

Well done.

8)

MD

[CELESCOPE]

That has the promise of a good image there CC if only the moon was,nt lurking about , u would have got alot more detail out of that one , it seems your set up is pretty good now CC , i know you love the DSLR, have you had any thoughts for going to a ccd camera , i think you would do some awesome images , seems you have come a long way in this imaging lark , great stuff mate

Rog

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Rog. I think I will get a CCD in the near future, I just need to get some accounts departments of my clients to see things the way that I do. Many of them seem to think that I'm some sort of free loan provider a lot of the time. The plan is necessarily somewhat fluid, but involves getting a faster 'scope, some kind of CCD camera and some RGB filters, not necessarily in that order. The DSLR is a love hate relationship. I love it (when it works well) but it hates me. The SC3 camera does loads of stuff I can't cope with at the moment, such as RGB imaging, that I haven't got the filters for, the 'scope I got first (200mm f/5 Skywatcher) seems to be the best so far for imaging and the HEQ5 skyscan that I got first seems a better tracker than the EQ6, maybe because its not overloaded.

What I'm learning is that the gear I've got is better than I am at the moment and is capable of a lot more than I thought, so I'm going to play with what I've got until the bank balance says otherwise. Could be Santa brings me one of Arthur's new cameras and a big RC, you never know, but more likely I'll get my hands on some RGB filters and an SXV or something similar. It could be that (as I suspect) RGB will not work from here as there's too much light pollution but I'll give it a go.

Thanks for your kind words of encouragement, it was your images that prodded me into trying to go where you have in the first place, so that means a lot to me. I started off thinking that I'd got all the ideas and no gear so I got all the gear and then realised that I'd no idea. Now I'm in the middle and need to catch up with the stuff I have collected over the few months that I've been into this hobby. This will be my first Astro-winter and i'm loving it so far.

Captain Chaos