First Picture with modded 350d (dont laugh to hard)

[nebula]

These are unguided, exposure was around 20 seconds by memory from light polluted Brisbane (4km from cbd). I had a light pollution filter on 350d. Scope used was a Megrez 72. I dont know what the target was please feel free to enlighten me :)

Stars are very elongated as to be expected. I have some small white x's on image, guessing these are dust?

Its ordinary but though I would put it up for some feed back. First photo is without colour balancing, second is with software colour balancing, not sure wether I should be doing this in software or on the camera? Also I am sure focus is way out, can I expect much better than this when I start using lappy with software to help focus?

[multiweb]

Not bad at all. Focus looks good. Got a bit of obvious trailing but that's due to you imaging at longer FL and not guiding. Field looks flat enough so you're on your way. Get into auto-guiding and you're there. Not sure what the DSO is. I'll have a wild guess: Jewelbox?

[BlackWidow]

Good start, and alot better than my first shot. In fact I have not yet posted any of my images as I have not pleased myself enough yet LOL. It is good to get ideas from others and we all have to start the learning curve at the same place. I am also not sure what the shot is of but pretty OK for your first attempt. It will just keep getting better and better from here. My best advice is to try different things, settings ISO and so on. Don't get stuck doing the same thing over and over or you will never improve. The more you try things the more mistakes and failures you will get, but you will learn about your equiptment and will get better results from doing so. I devide my learning into sections so that I can get to understand each step. I might spend two nights doing Polar Aligning untill I can do it well. Or take shots of one target over and over whilst changing settings to learn my camera, etc. I use the walk then run approach. I haven't started running yet!


Good Job

Mardy

[nebula]

Thanks Marc and Mardy.

Looks like it is the Jewel Box :)

About to spend remainder of day trying to work out best method for polar alligning my Heq5. This part is going to be rather confusing.

Might try this http://astronomy.abigbluesky.com/index.php/articles/how-toos/52-technical/80-polar-alignment-without-polari method to get started. If i use a piggy backed phillips webcam to track using software do I still need to do a polar allignement? and would the linked method be sufficient for this? I am trying to avoid drift aligntment, that looks horrible!

[multiweb]

Drift alignment sounds horrible indeed at first but once you take the time to do it once it is by far the easiest and quickest way to polar align your mount so my advice is bite the bullet and learn it. There are heaps of tuts on these forums and in the resources (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/projects.html)section.

[stephenb]

Nice work. My favorite object too! Mimosa (Beta Crucis) in the bottom left.

[ZeroID]

Jewel Box, yep. The small white crosses are probably hot pixels on the sensor. You will learn how to fix those when you learn to stack multiple images and use flats and darks and other weird things. I'm still figuring them out myself.