[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by Omaroo

Good stuff Mike. Glad to see you stepping outside your planetary comfort zone

Thanks Chris, it was definitely something I wasn't used to but I'm of course already very familiar with my DSLR so this wasn't a huge leap thank goodness.

How much is there involved in stacking using ImagePlus? Are you stacking RAW or JPEG images? Is there a shareware equivalent that you know of?

Like Paul said, DeepSkyStacker is free, and I did use that on my images first. It seemed to do a very good job too, and was maybe a bit quicker than IP. The image turned white in some cases and could only be seen/processed in photoshop after saving as TIF from DSS.

I captured in RAW, and converted to 16bit TIF using RawShooterPremium (after adjusting whitebalance to make them the same).

Originally Posted by sheeny

Turned to the dark side, eh?

It's quite a nice composition of the whole sword, not just M42.

Thanks Al, I was pleased that the FOV of the 350D with the ED80 could fit the whole sword including the running man.
I don't know about turning to the dark side.. My main love is still planetary, but this is a nice distraction when I can't capture Jupiter anymore and Mars is so low in the North.
I can also tell already that to do DSO's properly i'm going to need guiding, more time, more exposure, etc. It's a lot of work to capture 1 image

Originally Posted by Ric

Very nice indeed Mike, looking at that image one would think you have been imaging DSO's for years.

Thanks Ric, I'm pleased for my very first prime focus DSO - but a lot of the skills and techniques required can be transferred from any type of imaging.

Thanks everyone for your nice comments. It means a lot.