First M42/43

[allan gould]

Tried out my 8"SCT with f6.3 focal reducer with webcam autoguiding with Guidemaster on Friday night, and for the first time everything seemed to fall into place with no glitches or mishaps. Was quite happy with 2x300 sec shots put together with one 20 sec shot in Picture Window 3.5. I was running the laptop and mount on batteries but everything went OK. Thanks to Dave at Leyburn. I have a few other shots to put together from that night but it takes a while to process them.

[Dennis]

Well done Allan - a great image by itself, let alone a first light for the guiding gear.

Cheers

Dennis

[spearo]

Well done mate!
That's a great result and the combination with the briefer exposure shows the core nicely
very well done
keep it up
frank

[Ric]

Hi Allan, thats a great image you have captured, the central core area is very nice as well, you can pick the central stars nicely.

great stuff

[allan gould]

Thanks for the kind words.
I tried not to over-process the image as I wanted to still be able to see the very faint nebulosity surrounding M42 that is more apparent in the larger or full frame file.
I admit I was lazy and just processed the jpeg images as a first try at processing a DSLR image. Once I start to climb this steep learning curve and get a better grasp on focussing and aligning the image in the camera then I may go back and re-process some of the images. But I was just chuffed that for once everything worked as I wanted it to........lucky me!

[RB]

Allen you've done a lovely job, nice detail and the core looks great.
You've also got very nice colour detail there.

Well done.

[Octane]

Allan,

Great first attempt!

Regards,
Humayun

[ving]

the core (as already stated) is lovely, you have created a work of art. top first shot :)

[tornado33]

Yes, excellent processing to preserve all the detail without losing the brightest stuff.
Scott