orion

[cjamo9]

took this shot this morning its a 60sec exp at iso 6500. played with the colour a bit, got 15 shots but still dont know how to use dss properly. only 3 of the 15 dont have badly deformed stars.

[silv]

but hey - it's YOURS! yay! you have it!

in January, I took a picture of it, 2 seconds with 200mm on a tripod.
that's when I got myself hooked with the whole thing.
I will swoon when I get the chance to image it sort of properly.

I like the purple hue a lot!
my camera depicted it blue, though.
so that will be "my" Orion when I will capture it.

what do you mean with deformed stars?
care to upload an example?
I would like to see it and maybe someone here (or you?) has an explanation. always worth a learning experience.

:thumbsup:

[jjjnettie]

:D Woo Hoo Congrats.

[Nico13]

Hey great start, :thumbsup: a little hint try cutting you ISO back to 1600 or even 800 and give it another go, the detail you'll pick up will blow you away.

[cjamo9]

hi, the deformed stars are from bad tracking im using the cube pro from ioptron with a skywatcher 127 mak which is to close to the max payload for good tracking. iget a combination of heart shapes and double blobs. the cubepro is also alt/az as well so if targets are high in the sky i get wicked field rotation. i dont have a tracking scope yet, does anyone know if i can use the image generated by the dslr to track and take pictures, probably a stupid question as the screen goes blank when im taking a shot anyway.
the purple is from me playing in corel pro the shots i get come out grey or bluish, this one is in the colour that came from the camera and its got more deformed stars.

[cjamo9]

ok ill try that tomorrow morning. thanks.

[loki78]

I love the Orion Nebula and never get sick of seeing pics of it, I'm still yet to take one of my own. You should be very pleased with what you have and will only improve from here

Congrats :)

[silv]

ah, thank you for the 2nd photo. so you assume or know that this shape is due to the mount being maxed out.
bugger.
have done my first prime focal the other night and they show the same pattern. I hoped that if I get a proper focuser and the t-adaptor those mechanical bumps would be smoothed out. (have only used rubber band to attach camera to R&P focuser) but you are probably using the proper mounting - and yoour images show the same features. okay. *sigh*

thank you again!

[silv]

answered it yourself. :)
people use modern web cams for tracking.
have a look in the equipment discussions. there are some really good threads about guiding.

[cjamo9]

hi.
ive got the camera with a t2 mount screwed on the scope where normally the diagonal goes in(thanks to skywatcher having a male thread on this part), focus is with a JMI focuser, i plug the camera into my laptop and use the cannon software to focus on a magnified image then unplug the cp and focuser. ive got one of the remote timer/ shutter release things of ebay. works great but sometimes the neighbours tv remotes set it of. in hindsight i would have got the tower cubepro that can take a lot more weight than 12 pounds. i wont make that mistake again, next time im going for something that i can put my 12"dob on. ive got a couple of the tradgic digital eyepieces of ebay im in the process of modifying one of them to fit on a spare finder scope and ive downloaded guidedog of the net. i havent installed the ascom compliant firmaware upgrade on the mount yet. ill look into that next but the weight limit is what i think is the real problem, when i was using the 127 birdjones scope on this mount i didnt have the tracking problems as it was only 2/3rds the weight. shocking coma from a bird jones scope though.

[silv]

ah, well. it keeps us on our toes, aye :D

[Garbz]

May I suggest since you're shooting unguided and are saying that you have problems with deformed stars, rather than dropping back the ISO, drop back the shutterspeed. Leave the ISO up.

You want to get nice round stars consistently and not blow out the centre of the nebula. Then do LOTS of subs and stack them in deep sky stacker. I used this setup to take shots of darker nebula than the Orion one with great success before I bought an autoguider. :-)

[Daveskywill]

Was it a little washed out, due to the Sun rising?

To me the background looks a little blueish.

David

[cjamo9]

yes. the sun was coming in quick. within about 3 one minute shots of this i lost almost the whole nebula. it was all blue untill i turned it purple?