M82 with a SC3 webcam

[airprox]

OK chaps, after many years of fiddling around with scopes, and a wee dabble with afocal photography, I've finally moved on and got my cheap ish set up working, and last night everything came together to let me have a go at "proper" (ish) imaging.

I was using my ST120, unguided on my old CG5 Roboscope (finally working!). Despite having had my SC3 modded webcam for a good few years I've never had any success with it, so last night was an exercise in learning my way around Sharpcap and playing with the long exposure feature. For some reason I had a lot of frames that were black (need to look into that... dropped frames?), but I did manage to get a couple decent shots.

Having spent a fair amount of time looking at tutorials for taking images, I now need to look into processing, however, this shot was 5x20sec shots thrown roughly into Registax, and bounced off random buttons without changing any settings!

Have to say I'm reasonably happy, and with a bit more time setting up (you know, polar aligining and the like!) I hopeful that I can get longer subs and more details.

[barkis]

You should be happy, that's a great result from less that two minutes.

Ron.

[red dwalf]

i`m impressed,

[airprox]

Thanks for the comments ;-)

Having had time to think about things, I have a few questions...

1) as I increased the exposure time, I was reducing the gain. Is this correct? Or should I have been using a lower gain to begin with?

2) I tried taking some darks... his may sound odd, but should they be completely black? I thought that the hot pixels would show up. (it may be that the camera was dropping frames when I took them).

3) Will a 0.5 focal reducer effectively halve my magnification? Thinking that I could fit M81 and M82 in the same shot... also had a quick look at M42 before the cloud obscured, and there was no way I was going to fit it all in, I suspect the same for M31.

Right, off to read them primers on processing!

Cheers

Alun