I've spend the past few nights in Melbourne battling the cold and getting familiar with how to setup my mount, polar align, guiding etc.
I'm pretty damn happy with the progress I've made - going from never having done any of this before to being able to be polar aligned and plate solved in under 10 minutes (thanks Sharpcap PA tool and Astrophotography Tool Plate Solve!). Setting up EQMOD was a nightmare, but I got there in the end.
Anyway, time to start shooting images. So I go ahead, slew to the Helix Nebula and start taking 60 second subs at ISO 400. I'm still learning what the best ISO etc to use is, but I'm starting to get the hang of it all.
I'm having a major problem though - I believe it's either hot pixels or a busted camera chip. I'm using a Canon 650D DSLR which I'm borrowing from a mate, there seems to be some rather nasty stuff showing up on the images I'm taking.
Here's 20 subs (and 2 darks) stacked and terribly processed in Photoshop (I wanted to get more but the damn clouds moved in!). I'm only just learning how to process the data, lots of learning to do. If you zoom in you'll notice quite a few red pixels (I'm guessing these are hot?) and a whole bunch of purple ones also (which I have no idea what they are?).
Any critique/advice would be much appreciated (bear in mind this is my first ever set of subs and I'm in a fairly steep learning curve at the moment
).