The Heart of M42 Orion Nebula! First try!

[dylan_odonnell]

This is my first go at M42 from about 2am after moonset over the weekend.

After many attempts and failures over the last 6 months I was getting very disheartened at trying to image DSOs, but a few things fell into place last weekend as I cradled my red wine and got bitten half to death by mosquitos. The main one was a simple driver selection error in PHD (ASCOM instead of ON Camera) that worked *sorta* but would seize and fail enough to ruin everything. Fixing that and nailing my polar alignment workflow using drift alignment suddenly gave me sane graphs and long exposures. I was doing fist pumps into the sky!

This is a stack of 20 usable 60-90s subs (ISO 800/1600) on a night of poor seeing and light winds. Some post clean up in PS.
Celestron 9.25" SCT / Piece of sh#$ CG-5 Mount / 80mm guidescope / Canon 70D tethered shooting w/Backyard EOS / Stacked in Nebulosity

Now I can worry about minor stuff like coma and integration time instead of stupid stuff like ending PHD in task manager and watching my RA/DEC lines drift off into outer space. Yay!

Dylan

Higher Res:
http://deography.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/M42-bordered.jpg

[lazjen]

It's good when it all starts coming together, isn't it? :)

Looks like you're on your way. The bottom of your image has a lot of horizontal lines in it. What happened there?

[dylan_odonnell]

It sure is! :)

This image is uncropped so you can see the framing & registration around the edges. The FOV is extremely tight and I could crop in but I'm just leaving this one rough.

But my struggle with framing here is the CG-5 mount and PHD .. I have an issue where it suddenly pulses off wildly, so I have to reframe but the mount just drifts and I have to nudge it left, right, up, down until it settles down. I feel like I'm playing a computer game. It's like it doesn't know how to stop going in one direction so I have to manually apply backlash until it stops. Any suggestions welcome before I throw money at it and get something else - which I'm wholeheartedly for.

d

[lazjen]

It sounds like you might need to tweak some of your settings in PHD. To start, if you're not using the latest PHD2, I'd move to that first - there's been a lot of improvements in the new version.

With the settings, make sure you've got the base configuration correct (focal length, etc). If they're all ok (and your mount is reasonably balanced and has good PA), then you may need to tweak how much correction is being applied each time. Make sure things are in order first before you go head first into tweaking the PHD settings. Good luck. :)

[jenchris]

I just went to on camera as well as the EQmod was really flaky.
I have just bought a hitechastro EQdirect lead which I'm looking forward to trying as well.
Sirius Optics didn't have the EQ6 cable so I bought the EQ5 with the RJ45 end and made up a lead to convert to the DB9 connector which was good as I now have a long enough cable to stretch to the laptop on the bench.

[multiweb]

Great shot. Just need to mirror it and go a little easier on the sharpening or make a star mask. Very good details and focus. :thumbsup:

[pluto]

Looking good Dylan, some great detail and the colours are really nice :D

[dylan_odonnell]

Thanks! I have been tweaking the PHD settings a bit and can see there are a *lot* of combinations that can be applied. Will keep fiddling and see if I get to the bottom of it.

Thanks Hugh & multiweb! Pretty happy.. can't wait to refine and try it again.

Jenchris, have we met at SAS?