First M42

[Mark-mck]

Hey everyone.

Felt the need to share this with everyone as it's my first attempt.

the image is just a single jpeg, i've played a little bit with it in digital photo professional and to be honest i havn't a clue what i'm doing.

i did spend about 3 hours last night taking lots of subs at different exposure times but unfortunatly i forgot to check the focus! lesson learnt.

but fortunatly i manged to get this while i was playing and shooting pretty much everything i could.

Iso800

15s exposure

[virtualpilot45]

Removed the bluey background and raised a curve (tbh haven't a clue how they work!) and I got this:

[RogerTheDodger]

Nice one Mark

[Mark-mck]

Another one i've managed to salvage. think the iso was 800 and 25 or 30s exposure.

[MikeWilson]

Nice work Mark. Stars are round and small and you've isolated the trap with the short exposures.

What you really need to do is get a lot of these. At least ten of the short 30 second ones. Then stack them with your darks and flats.

EDIT: You definitely need flats.

[bigal1]

Great first attempts well done

[Mark-mck]

Thanks for the praise guy's, i know it's not pic of the week material but i'm just happy to of finally got my first proper scope and taken a few pic's.

i did spend about 2 hours taking a series of sub's all at iso400 with exposure of 5s,10s,15s,20s,25s and 30s i took 20 subs at each exposure setting and also 20 darks of each too, would my methodology be correct? or would that be over kill on the darks?

unfortunatly i didnt check the focus when i did all of those so there usless the only usable sub's i have are from when i was "just playing" i have 6 and have stacked them in DSS and was wondering could i use the darks i took for the other subs? there different iso settings?

also i'm not having much luck with processing post stacking as i cnat find any program i have that will open the .tif file and its also 85Mb seems an awful lol for only 6 sub's.

any comments would be appreciated guys.