First attempt at Eta Carina

[AstroTom]

Hi Everyone,

I thought I would post my first photo of the Eta Carina nebula, well the centre of it. I took this from Brisbane suburbs and the light from Brisbane city centre was directly below the nebula at the time of taking the photo. I took this photo via the following:

60 x 20 sec lights at ISO 800
20 x darks frames
20 x bias frames

I stacked all of these in Deep Sky Stacker and finished off in Lightroom.

The camera was a modded Canon EOS 600D and this was attached to a Celestron CPC 800 telescope. I didn't have the telescope on the wedge at the time as I was mainly wanting to just have a quick play around with the new camera but got carried away. There was no guiding either.

I am thinking that I should have taken the subs with ISO 160. I did try ISO 3200 to begin with but this was washed out with the light pollution. I am going to take some more photos of this nebula in the coming days with my unmodded Canon EOS 6D and will try the higher ISO then. It will be good to see how this camera compares with the modded.

Regards,

Tom

[cometcatcher]

That's not a bad first Eta C. Looks like there's some good data there.

Your strategy is good going to a lower ISO if it's too bright. A light pollution filter may help in your case also.

[Retrograde]

Good result from a light-polluted sky.
It looks to me like the data can possibly be pushed a bit harder at the post processing stage.

[AstroTom]

Thanks for your comments and advice Cometcatcher and Retrograde. I actually went out again last night and took some more subs of Eta Carina and produced the image below. I also did a cropped version around the eta Carin centre as well and attcahed this below. This time I had the light pollution filter on and used the 600D modded camera. I took the following:

80 x 20 sec Lights at ISO 3200
20 darks
20 bias

There is more detail in this photo than the last but the noise is also more evident. But I am still quite happy with this. I'll also see if I can stretch the last photo a little further too.

Thanks,

Tom

[cometcatcher]

If you take flat frames you will be able to stretch further without vignetting also. Flats really help with that.

[raymo]

I'd rather have a noisy image with a lot of data than a quiet one with
much less data. You can try and do something about the noise, but you
can't do anything if there is no data to work with.
raymo