This is my first go at M42 from about 2am after moonset over the weekend.
After many attempts and failures over the last 6 months I was getting very disheartened at trying to image DSOs, but a few things fell into place last weekend as I cradled my red wine and got bitten half to death by mosquitos. The main one was a simple driver selection error in PHD (ASCOM instead of ON Camera) that worked *sorta* but would seize and fail enough to ruin everything. Fixing that and nailing my polar alignment workflow using drift alignment suddenly gave me sane graphs and long exposures. I was doing fist pumps into the sky!
This is a stack of 20 usable 60-90s subs (ISO 800/1600) on a night of poor seeing and light winds. Some post clean up in PS.
Celestron 9.25" SCT / Piece of sh#$ CG-5 Mount / 80mm guidescope / Canon 70D tethered shooting w/Backyard EOS / Stacked in Nebulosity
Now I can worry about minor stuff like coma and integration time instead of stupid stuff like ending PHD in task manager and watching my RA/DEC lines drift off into outer space. Yay!
Dylan
Higher Res:
http://deography.com/wp-content/uplo...2-bordered.jpg