Widefield 06-11-2010

[mswhin63]

Hi All,


Experimenting with colour more than alignment. 2 widefield shot taken with my unmodded camera. Usually run at 15 sec sub but in this case I extended it to 30 secs so there is elongated stars on this.
Milky way, realised after not a good idea to get 20 subs with trees so I copy the tree outline from a single frame and pasted it onto the final image. Worked reasonable well with only a few impefections.
For the first time I took shot of LMC and SMC and shocked to see no fuzzy in the pic. A more realistic shot. I am pretty chuffed :D
I hope to mount my DSLR on my DOB while imaging planet can take longer subs at 55mm instead of 18mm.

20 subs + 20 darks and JPG dont do it justice.

[Sylvain]

I like your shots mate!
So how many 30s shots for the LMC & SML?!
Was that totally unguided...? i'm kinda confused!

But your pictures are terrific I have to admit! You've got a maginificent sky too!

[mswhin63]

LMC/SMC same 20 subs and same 20 darks (literally)

Stuck on a tripod yep totally unguided. Easy to do on 18mm lens any more and the image would suffer.

Location - my old stomping ground. I now co-ordinate Southern District ASWA event at Jarrahdale, generally very calm as it is a valley blocked on three side from winds. Unfortunately not on the 6th :( so no Jupiter images. Very dewy on the night so a lot of sky glow from the city, usually very dark.

[Heath]

Great shots Malcolm!

What did you use to stack them?

[multiweb]

Very nice. Second one with the LMC is very crisp. :thumbsup:

[Lester]

Very nice wide fields Malcolm. Thanks for the views.

[mswhin63]

Thanks Heath and all others for the comments, I use Deepskystacker (DSS) to stack them. Recently I was getting Out of Memory issues but found a work around.

The final images after 2 x drizzling are 300MB in size. So much more detail.

I am thinking about trying IRIS for stacking.

[mswhin63]

Thankyou, I like the L and SMC's as well. There was some misty clouds running through the subs on the first one, It was a fairly short night due to the weather and packed up not long after these shots.

[Sylvain]

Awesome! thanks for the details :)
Might try something similar next time i head to dark skies :)

[NorthernLight]

very nice pictures and quite a clever idea to copy the tree´s in!
It is enouraging to see such work done with basic equipment-pushed to the limit.

cheers

[midnight]

Well done Malcolm.

Good to see the effects of Kwinana missing for a change in your wide field shots:D I know this has bugged you for a while!

Personally, I like wide field shots more than deep space and your shot of the clouds of Magellan is very nice and I would have to agree that jpgs don't do them justice.

Great to get away from city/suburban lights:). Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,
Darrin...

[rogerg]

good to see some shots from you malcolm. .. fixed tripod 'eh.. not bad. If you have photoshop the next improvement would be to flatten the gradient in the images, make the background more uniform. If you can work out how to do that (with or without photoshop) I think you'll find you can significantly expand your opportunities with the fixed tripod. Happy to help with with techniques if you have photoshop.

Roger.

[mswhin63]

Thanks everyone for the comments, I only have GIMP and all I did was reduced the size and convert to a JPG no touching up has been done.

I will see if GIMP can do anything with the images but realise as well GIMP is only 8 bit. I may look at purchacing Photoshop when i start doing some more serious DS AP. In meantime I am just playing around.

I will see if I work out how to flatten the gradient, trial and error is a good way to learn although asking can help too :)

[Jen]

:thumbsup: nice pics Malcolm

[atalas]

Nice shots Malcolm....second one gets my vote.