First attempt at Triffid, Lagoon and Sculptor

[athua]

I clear skies last night so had my first attempt at taking some prime focus pictures with my unmodded Canon 60D DSLR and a Celestron F6.3 Focal Reducer on a Celestron C8-XLT with an AVX Mount.

Triffid Nebula
1x30sec 1600 ISO
20x35sec 1600 ISO
5x35sec 1600 ISO Darks

Lagoon Nebula
11x30sec 1600 ISO
5x35sec 1600 ISO Darks

Sculptor Galaxy
11x30sec 1600 ISO
5x35sec 1600 ISO Darks

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

[LightningNZ]

Pretty darn good for first attempts!

If you can take some flat field images (white t-shirt over the scope and pointed at a random blank part of the sky should do it) then you can remove any hint of vignetting you have at present - which will give you a nice even illumination across the field of your images. They'll also help you keep the noise balanced across the image during processing, so you don't have to clip the left (black) side of the brightness histogram.

[RickS]

Hi Gus,

That looks pretty good. Especially for relatively short exposure times on a DSLR. The images look black clipped so that's something you might want to work on.

Cheers,
Rick.

[athua]

Hi Cam and Rick,

Thanks for the feedback about the clipping in the blacks and with the use of flats to help in eliminating the vignetting in the images.

I am pretty pleased with these first attempts as I have been reading up lots on how to do them and it all came together pretty well on the night.

I have always been interested in photography but have only just got into astronomy recently which led me into getting my C8 scope in August.

It has been a big learning experience and I am only just getting my polar alignments good enough to take 30 to 40 second subs. Will be continuing to work on the polar alignment accuracy for longer subs and also experimenting more with DSS and Photoshop to improve the processing of the images.

[G58]

Nice photos mate, I will have to try harder I have unmodified canon 50D

[gaa_ian]

Bloody awesome 1st attempt ! I have only just started taking wide field shots with my 700D and have a long way to go till I get to this level ! Well done

[raymo]

Great job Gus. I find it interesting that my Lagoons have far more blue in
them than yours, and yet my 253s have much less blue than yours.
Must be differences in processing, I suppose. Keep up the good work.
raymo

[dylan_odonnell]

Fantastic work really. Your polar alignment must be pretty good to get those unguided. Do you think you will go guided eventually?

[athua]

Thanks guys for all the positive feedback. Its pretty amazing what can be captured on the camera compared to what can be seen visually.

Getting a good polar alignment has been made much easier now that Celestron has released a beta firmware that has fixed the all star polar alignment function in their mounts for the Southern Hemisphere.

I only completed the alignment process once so the alignment was only ok. I think if I was to repeat it a couple more times, I would have got even better polar alignment to allow for longer exposures.

I may go guided in the future but being only new to this hobby I will stick with the tracking provided by the mount for now and see how I go.

[raymo]

Hi Gus, If you are using your C-8 without a reducer you will only get around 60-75 secs, and around 90-105 with one, assuming that your
PA is very good.
raymo

[stevous67]

Very good indeed. My first attempt of NGC253 turned out to be just a black screen!

Steve

[antimorris]

I wish my first attempts at these targets looked half as good as yours. Flats will most definitely help greatly as well as watching the black point when processing, but both of those have been mentioned already. Just keep at it, the more you do, the more you learn, and the better your images will be. Keep at it!

[Rex]

Really nice Gus for first attempts, mate your doing well, keep it up.

[BruceG]

Well Gus, you have certainly leapt out of the starting block with these images! Awesome first attempts. Look forward to seeing more from you on these pages.
Bruce.

[PeterEde]

Great shots