Quote:
Originally Posted by kosh
Thanks everyone for your feedback,
The images are taken on a canon 450D @ 1600 ISO .
20 x light, 11 dark and bias. Ed80 on a Heq5 pro mount.
I used live view for focusing at 5x then at 10x and looked good at the time, wonder what happened.
All advice appreciated
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Kosh...you really need to connect the camera to a laptop and use a program like
APT or
BYEOS (site is down atm) to control the camera and obtain fine focus. Fine focus using the rear LCD on the camera is well...not the best, 3rd rate at best! Not knocking what you have achieved in fact you have done well, but focusing on a laptop...lets say x 768 screen with Full Well half measure (FWHM) is a whole quantum better than using the rear LCD screen. I went thru trailing video screens (of various resolution) and such like but found at minimum a 1366 x 768 screen a whole lot better!
These astro camera control programs are a hoot! They make life so much easier that is not funny! In fact i wonder how I did it many many years back...I've forgotten, thankfully!
Practice your polar alignments or indeed for astrophotography try to learn drift alignment. There are a whole bunch of
youtube videos out there and
webs sites to learn this (see Drift Method Polar Alignment.pdf).
It just takes practice, once learned, you'll be an old hack in no time! Your mount and camera are top notch it's as said...a learning curve that cannot be done in 1 week...or even a year!
If all else in drift align fails...ask...plenty of users nearby to help!
Brendan
Edit:
forgot to say...I tried stretching you image in PS but had real trouble as the data was way down the left side of the histogram...meaning the image was way too short. As a rule of thumb, aim to image the histogram peaks to around 1/3 away from far left side of the histogram log. The far left is the darks, the far right is the lights! In otherwords not too dark (as these are) but not too much light as well! This is why we stack images instead of overexposing them. The light (image noise and light pollution) will wash out the image.