David Fitz-Henr
06-09-2009, 06:52 PM
At the behest of my astro-mate Marcus (marc4darkskies), I thought I would show some of my first images from my foray into the world of deep sky imaging. These were taken last night (Saturday) under the light of the full moon. Actually, I was struggling to align the camera square with the optical axis, but after a couple of iterations I thought it good enough to take some shots.
1. M8 (lagoon neb): 10 subs at 150 secs each with dark frame. I think this turned out reasonably good, just basic processing using ImagesPlus - I didn't try to enhance the colours and I think it works well. I did a final tweak in Photoshop Elements (adjusted the mid point marker under the Levels menu - I'm not used to ImagesPlus but there's probably just as easy a way to achieve the same thing there I guess).
2. M20 (Trifid neb): 9 subs at 150 secs each with dark frame. Looking at this now, it could perhaps have benefited with some enhancements to blue and red.
3. 47 Tucanae : 7 subs at 240 secs each with dark frame (although dark was 150 secs - forgot to take a matching dark). I had to partly re-process this after I transferred the image to my main PC. For some reason, the stars seemed to be banded or washed out a bit when looking at my monitor, although it looked acceptable on my notebook monitor. Both are set to display 32 bit colour quality so was a bit surprised by the difference.
All shots were taken using an unmodified Canon 400D on a home made 200mm Newtonian (using Paracorr) on a Paramount ME. I don't have a guide scope / camera, so all shots were unguided. I limited the first two sets (M8 & M20) to 150 seconds for each sub, and pushed the third (47 Tucanae) out to 240 seconds. The stars look reasonably round in all, but perhaps if the seeing was better you could detect some elongation - hopefully next weekend will have better seeing (well, at least the moon won't be full !).
1. M8 (lagoon neb): 10 subs at 150 secs each with dark frame. I think this turned out reasonably good, just basic processing using ImagesPlus - I didn't try to enhance the colours and I think it works well. I did a final tweak in Photoshop Elements (adjusted the mid point marker under the Levels menu - I'm not used to ImagesPlus but there's probably just as easy a way to achieve the same thing there I guess).
2. M20 (Trifid neb): 9 subs at 150 secs each with dark frame. Looking at this now, it could perhaps have benefited with some enhancements to blue and red.
3. 47 Tucanae : 7 subs at 240 secs each with dark frame (although dark was 150 secs - forgot to take a matching dark). I had to partly re-process this after I transferred the image to my main PC. For some reason, the stars seemed to be banded or washed out a bit when looking at my monitor, although it looked acceptable on my notebook monitor. Both are set to display 32 bit colour quality so was a bit surprised by the difference.
All shots were taken using an unmodified Canon 400D on a home made 200mm Newtonian (using Paracorr) on a Paramount ME. I don't have a guide scope / camera, so all shots were unguided. I limited the first two sets (M8 & M20) to 150 seconds for each sub, and pushed the third (47 Tucanae) out to 240 seconds. The stars look reasonably round in all, but perhaps if the seeing was better you could detect some elongation - hopefully next weekend will have better seeing (well, at least the moon won't be full !).