M8 and m20

[Gvarouha]

Hi all,

This is the first first image I have ever taken and am after some advice on what I could do to improve. Feel free to be brutal.

Image taken with guided SW ed80, cannon 40d
Lights: 12 x 240 iso800
Darks: 10
Flats: 10
Bias: 15

Cheers

[Cimitar]

Hi George, that's a fantastic first image! Well done :thumbsup:
Evan

[Atmos]

For your first image ever, that is a really good shot! Slaughters all of my first images :P
As for a suggestion (some may view it as a bit pointless) would be to take some more bias frames. The reason being that it'll decrease any noise generated by them and taking 100 bias frames on a DSLR only takes 30 seconds :)

Still a great shot :)

[Gvarouha]

Thanks Evan and Colin

I'll try more bias frames next time around

[raymo]

It doesn't make sense to use more bias frames to reduce the noise that was generated by using bias frames in the first place. Bias frames are
not needed at all, provided that the dark frames match the lights
precisely, including the ISO. Darks contain bias data.
raymo

[Gvarouha]

The image looks ok when viewing at a small scale. But once viewed at 100% or at print size There is a lot of grain around the darker parts of the nebula.

Not sure if that's something I can fix in processing or during the imaging stage.

[Atmos]

I guess noise like that just means that it typically needs more exposure time. 12 shots is a good start but you could always aim for 50 :D

[rcheshire]

Way way way better than my first image.

There is probably more data available than might be imagined, even with 12 subs. What preprocessing software are you using.

[Gvarouha]

I'm using DSS to stack and then photoshop for processing.