Wide fields from 7th September

[hotspur]

A few quick wide fields from last night.I used a Canon 10-22 mm lens and 50D mounted on a Vixen GP mount,and was able to get five and six minute exposures.

Mainly Northern Milky way region,and one looking South.It was good to get outside and see some stars (and not watch the election circus).

Hope these are of interest.I'll have to find a decent book on astro processing,so I can learn how to stack and flat etc.

All taken in our back garden.

[gregbradley]

Very nice Chris. The first and last image though looks heavly black clipped. That means the left hand side of the histogram (where all the dark areas of the image are) has been cut off in the processing.

So one tip is to either watch a histogram while processing and leave a bit of space to the left of the histogram curve so you are not deleting the dimmer parts of an image. Particularly important in Astrphotograhy image processing as you have lots of dim details in almost any image.

Ron Wodaski's The Zone System is a good astrophotography Photoshop based CCD oriented processing book. For DSLRs the bulk is the same but most use the free Deep Sky Stacker to stack images. As far as flats and darks go I don't think they are needed for this type of work. Just set your camera to long exposure noise reduction on for incamera darks (it doubles the exposure time) and as far as vignetting goes Lightroom and or Canon free software should correct for that. Flats is more for CCD imaging. DSLRs usually only suffer from lens vignetting which is easily corrected. Some do it automatically as an option in the menus.

Alternatively watch Louie Atalas's free processing tutorials. They are about Photoshop but they are excellent.

Greg.

[hotspur]

Thanks Greg-yes,thought some of the detail was not correctly processed,I'll get a copy of that book you mention,(not sure where its sold-maybe Bintel?).

Might try again tonight,I have left mount in yard,to try and get Spica/moon conjunction,hopefully not too much smoke will be around from grass fires.

[Larryp]

Nice work, Chris :thumbsup:

[Ross G]

Great looking widefields Chris.

Nice colours.

Ross.

[hotspur]

Thanks Larry and Ross,the tracking from the Vixen GP mount and DD1 controller and motors is very good.