[Benjamin (Ben)]

Had my first chance to try some astrophotography and came up with the following images. The first was a pretty wild attempt at the Lagoon and Triffid with a few stacked short exposures (small number of darks too all at ISO3200) with a poorly aligned mount and hit and miss focus. All pretty terrible! The second image of Eta Carina I spent much more time drift aligning, managed to use my homemade Bahtinov mask to focus in liveview on my Canon 600D and pushed exposures to 2 minutes. I've put up an unprocessed single frame (2 minutes at ISO800) and an image processed through Nebulosity comprising 3 frames at ISO1600 and 2 frames at ISO800 (both 2 minutes) with a small number of darks subtracted (would have had more darks to subtract but my camera battery died!). Haven't subtracted any bias or light frames. I'm very interested in using these images to document my visual observations so not trying to win any awards but would really appreciate advice on simple things I can do to refine the technique. Want to limit the number of exposures/darks and be able to move on to the next target reasonably quickly. I'm using an ED80 (with a .80 focal reducer) on an EQ3-2 driven mount.