[gregbradley]

Welcome to the TEC club!

Nice shots.

Longer exposure needed for galaxies but a nice start. 6 hours is probably minimum as you are using one shot colour at 20%QE or so and even with 60% QE mono I'd be going 6 hours at F7.

The longer shots gets rid of the colour noise which is always going to be a problem with galaxy shots. Noise Ninja also helps or gaussian blur or the blur tool rubbed on noisy areas.

But long exposure is the basic thing.

Did you use the TEC flattener or is that not needed for your camera?

As far as flats go I can't see any vignetting or dust donuts in the image so no real loss there. As far as darks go there are a few minor hot pixels here and there. You could photoshop them out with the healing brush. Mike Sidonio could tell you if there is much gain from darks with a camera that clean. He never used them and produced lots of great images. If you don't you can also use hot/cold pixel removal in CCDsoft or CCDstack to get rid of those few hot pixels. Darks and flats only take a little bit of effort so its not saving a lot of work though.


Greg.