Another Crux

[SimmoW]

Thanks to Dunk for inspiring me to persevere with this lovely area. Took this from my LPolluted backyard, using an IDAS LP1 filter and my modded EOS 40D SLR. 50mm lens at F4, 5 * 30 second images at 800 ISO and only one dark & flat. I tweaked the hell out of the image using Pixinsight, feedback welcome.

Being positive, I liked some of the colours emerging and at least i captured my first coal sack (albeit faint!).

Really disappointed at how bad the LP seems, can't go past 30 seconds. Dunk's image is only 10 secs! Oh for some dark skies...

[Amaranthus]

As an alternative, you could try stacking a bunch of short subs, e.g. 25 x 5 sec subs, with darks, and see how that goes?

[cometcatcher]

It's certainly got potential. More subs would definitely help. If the LP is fogging the frame that bad, I'd drop the ISO to 400 and expose so the histogram is one third to the left. Take as many frames as possible. The more frames you have the harder you can stretch the final image. A few more darks and flats would be good also.

[SimmoW]

thanks chaps, I'm actually pretty happy with the 30 second exposures, so now I need to do a heap more it sounds, plus more darks. Just playing around, experimenting for now, but it's a good starting point, I spose, considering the LP challenges.

[LightningNZ]

Yup, drop the ISO to 400 and the exposure time to 20 secs, then take as many frames as you have the patience to take and stack them with Deep Sky Stacker or some-such software.

With only 20 second images you'll have very little dark noise, but flats are very useful in all situations. Just set your computer screen to white (in MS Paint or Photoshop) and take a bunch of images of this with exactly the same infinity focus and other settings - except that you want the exposure to be of a length that the image histogram has its peak roughly halfway through the brightness scale. Feed those flats into Deep Sky Stacker too.

Hope this helps,
Cam