Hi All,
First picture for quite a while. I've been trying to get my polar alignment and auto-guiding working sufficiently well to warrant actually exposing stars.
It's still not really working well though I've had some improvements. This one was from the best 7 of 17 x 100s exposures with the Canon 40D at 800iso through the York Optical ED80 and 0.8x reducer. Even with just the best 7 and short exposure the stars still aren't round. I'm getting a little discouraged with the LXD75. I'd really love to run longer deeper exposures and use slower less noisy ISO.
No flats just darks for this. Processed and combined in Images Plus and then tweaked up and cropped (to get rid of vignetting) in Photoshop CS3. The off centre composition is deliberate - trying the rule of thirds on astro ;-)
Anyway, here it is
comments and advice welcome.
cheers,
Rob