Glenden M42

[Mick]

Hello everyone, I travelled west away from the coast overnight with an observing friend to Glenden in central Queensland. Glenden is a small mining town with lovely dark skies; we had 5 hours of objects like 47 Tuc, NGC 253, M31 through a short focal sky watcher refractor, Saturn and M42. It was a wonderful night and well worth the effort. This is a photo of M42 from last night. Single image 24.5sec f/2.9 ISO 100 Afocal with 26mm EP and LX90.

[iceman]

Great shot for afocal! Sounds like a good night out too.. for once, new moon weekend was a clear one for everyone :)

Is the LX90 motordriven?

How did you attach the camera to the EP? Or did you hand-hold it there for 24.5 seconds? :)

[Mick]

Yes Ice, the LX90 is motor driven, I don't have a wedge to polar mount it so all my photos taken with the scope Alt/Az mounted.

I use a Tele Vue adaptor to attach the Nikon digital camera to the EP; it's very easy to use.

[rumples riot]

Good start, you might like to do some more processing as I think you will find more detail there.

Paul

[Mick]

Thanks Paul, I don't have Photo Processing softwear :(

[iceman]

You can get the trial of photoshop CS, though it is expensive to buy. You can also get a trial of paintshoppro, which lasts for longer.

There's also PixInSight LE, which is free, and by all reports more powerful than photoshop CS for astro-processing.. it's just more learning curve and if you don't know much about image processing it's really going to test your knowledge.

There's a bunch of others i've read that people use, like gimp, iris, etc.. I think some of them are free.

Have a search around i'm sure there's something that will at least let you do some curve manipulation, unsharping etc.