[rcheshire (Rowland)]

In the spirit of sharing the good and the bad. This is 2 hours 8 mins of a familiar target, which is right overhead and free of steep suburban light gradients. As usual, cloud rolled in at about 2300.

With little time to spend on this hobby and not wanting to spend big, most of my equipment is second hand, modified and old. I try to make the most of it.

32 frames 4 minutes @ ISO200 - cooled 450D -5C. Bias and flats ISO100. Still experimenting with ISO now that I have auto-guiding. I could say that dynamic range seems better with some nice blues and reds showing through, but another hour of data would have been preferable. It's a little subdued.

This preview is straight out of Asterism, with a little tweaking in ImageMagick. Yet to attempt a StarTools version. Will have to work on the preprocessing. I prefer to fix the data during preprocessing, if I can. It produces better results all round. Having said that, image acquisition is the key.

Second image - hot pixels can be seen in a dither pattern. Fixed with a defect map / dark frame in the first image. different rejection parameters - will get around to that later in the week.

I've added an earlier effort, taken 5 or 6 years ago, with a 200mm lens and full frame camera.