Hi Everyone,
Well, I bit the bullet and had a go tonight. I was going to stay inside in the warmth but I walked past the new beast, spotted it and thought: "Why not?"
Took the beast out next to the pool, fiddled with the polarscope and got the mount lined up with the SCP (easier than I thought and therefore all my drift aligning research flew out the window) and then proceeded to show my youngest (he's 9) all the cool things using the goto. He drove the scope for me and called out what he thought each item was, globular, open cluster, fuzzy cloudy thingy etc...He did a good job too!
After he went inside to bed, I decided to see if I could attach the 1000D to the scope and give it a go. Hmmm, how to focus? Selected Altair from the handset and used the liveview to focus. Three minutes later I was slewing to M8 and taking some test 30 sec subs. COLOUR appeared! Cool
. Raced inside to get the laptop and used the Canon capture program to perform longer than 30 sec subs with the computer.
I noticed a few frames had slightly eggy stars (which I threw away) probably due to the mount not being PEC'd? I dunno. Most were good so I used what looked OK. Remembered to take a dark frame of the same length then proceeded to take some more of M22 and Trifid ( haven't processed these yet). I haven't even tried the autoguiding yet, still starting out so this will have to wait. I stuck with 30 sec subs as any longer tended to show eggy stars, I am sure longer subs are needed for more data.
So, anyway, here is my first go into the dark side....feel free to comment and offer advice. I am a complete newbie when it comes to processing so I hope I didn't commit too many cardinal sins. Please let me know where I can improve. Details below.
Image Details:
Subject: M8 Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius
Telescope: Black Diamond 200mm Reflector @ F5 on HEQ5 Pro
Camera: Canon 1000D
Capture: Canon EOS Utility
Guiding: No
Frames: 8 x 30 second at ISO 800, 1 x Dark Frame
Processing: Registax 5 only
Here is a
link to a less compressed JPEG (1.1Meg) Sorry if the attachment is too large to view easily, I havent figured out the best format to post here yet. Press the four arrow button on the attachment viewer to make it all visible.
Cheers
Chris