My first ever image... you guessed it... M42 NoH8 ;)

[Bendy777]

He guys.. I cant even begin to describe the trauma getting this has caused me! Issue apon issue... I ended up manually stacking 50 of my light frames and 15 of my darks in photoshop... no i havent slept. They were unguided 30sec iso1600 subs on a fairly cold night, Im sure you can do the math but its 25 mins of exposure out the 90 frames (45mins) that I could have stacked (but got to tired). Please let me know what you think :)

[Larryp]

Great first effort!:thumbsup:

[Bendy777]

Thanks man!

[ZeroID]

Not too bad at all Bendy. Nice natural colours and good dust lanes. Well done..
What was the hardware setup for this ?

[Bendy777]

Thanks man! My gear is as follows: Skywatcher ED80, Skywatcher HEQ5 GoTo Mount and a Canon EOS 600D running Magic Lantern (a freeware that has a whole bunch of cool feature's such as an in camera intervalometer). Thats all, no guiding, no laptop.

[WingnutR32]

Well done Ben! Time spent on good polar alignment makes all the effort worth it!

We will sort out DSS and get things running right, although, we will have to play with the Windows version, I cannot help on the Mac front.

Feel free to drop in with your subs and we can stack them on my PC just to be sure all is good if you want.

Again, great effort! Pinpoint stars :-D

[pluto]

Nice Bendy, great first image :)
I have a similar setup but with a 5DmkII and I usually take 45sec exposures at different ISOs to get more range (especially for m42). For example this: http://goo.gl/ABUVd was about 30 frames of 45sec exp at each of ISO1600, ISO3200 and ISO6400 plus a heap of dark frames and all stacked in DeepSkyStacker.
I've always been tempted by Magic Lantern but never really needed it as I don't do any serious video stuff, I like the idea of a built in intervalometer though.

[Bendy777]

Bro! ill deffinately hit you up on that when I get back from Perth! We deffinately spent a long time together with that star drift aligning! Crazy!

[Bendy777]

Yeah sweet im deffinately going to start playing around with all that... on the night i was just stoked that i could see the dam thing ahahahaha! Yeah man magic lantern is boss! although it plays up, for instance on the night it wasnt letting me go for the nice longer exposures that my allignment could have handled but its soooooooo worth a looksie and a play! its great for lightning photography too!

[bloodhound31]

It craps all over my first image Ben! Off to a good start, now watch you go from strength to strength. Make sure you listen to the advice of these fine people on IIS when it comes to processing your stacked image. There's a wealth of experience here to draw from.

[Octane]

Well done, nh. :P

As mentioned on fb, it is imperative that you nail the fundamentals. You've done well with round stars owing to good polar alignment.

Next, use my template for composition, to turn this first effort into a grand one.

What's doing in Perf?

H

[ourkind]

Nice image Ben well done indeed!! :thumbsup: The nebula and colours look great!! Is this a combination of lights and darks or just lights?

Seriously Well done! I remember looking at my first ever sub of M42 and nearly fell of my chair at a the image on the LCD on the back of my camera, very memorable :)

[Bendy777]

WOW! this is amazing feedback and encouragement! thanks soooo much :D I will take onboard as much as my wacko brain allows! Carlos! Its umm... 50 lights and 15 darks :) ive done a revised image with all 98 lights and 34 darks which has dramaticly improved the core data and not much else has changed but still no idea if the method im using to "stack" in PS is effective to the same extent as DSS (pretty safe to say its not) but will find out when I can get over to Sam's place again and use his DSS :) H ma babez (NH) im in Perth for church conference, im representing the ACT youth Pastors :)

[Bendy777]

ok so not as dramatic as mentioned and not sure why all this extra red around the edges... but here is the revised (still non dss) version of all my lights and darks taken on the night.

[ourkind]

Nice one Ben, I prefer the revised version myself :thumbsup:

[Bendy777]

Cheers! :p