First astro photo

[BC]

Finally we had a nice calm, clear night and I got a first real go at try some photography with my 500D. It was just attached straight onto the EQ6 with a home-made adapter using the 55-250mm lens. I used ISO 800 and took 8 x 30sec pics. The mount was just plonked down in my usual fashion so the polar alignment is pretty shoddy. I used Gimp to manually register and stack the jpgs (don't know how to do the same with the raw). I tried Registax but it didn't seem to cope with the file sizes at all. Anyway, I was pleased to see some colour.

PS - At 300kb the image still looked rather like the original, but the closer I get down to the 200kb limit, the more grey stuff appears. Not sure what I'm doing wrong there?

Bruce

[renormalised]

Where's the piccie??

Registax is good for planetary and lunar shots. For sky shots and DSO's, try DeepSkyStacker (http://deepskystacker.free.fr/english/index.html).

[multiweb]

I recognise Eta Carina. Not bad at all. You'll need to reduce your shot in PS first so the file size is approx. 200kb then re-upload it.

[rcheshire]

Good start Bruce. The ufraw plugin for GIMP will let you play with raw settings before you commit the image to GIMP. Just open as layers and use the difference setting to line them all up. A bit tedious if you have lots of images.