Here's a quick and dirty shot of Orion's Belt and the Flame/Horsehead Nebulae area using a few test frames that I shot for a 2 am demo of Deep Sky Stacker at Chris' (hotspur) fabulously dark-skied home. Comparing against
prokyon's amazing image, I can see that a lot of the fainter nebulosity is starting to come through.
Details: 38x 59 sec subs at f/4, ISO 6400 using a Canon 5DmkII mounted on an Astrotrac. Darks and bias frames were shot and used in the stack, but I messed up the flats by accident.
I didn't polar align the mount properly (just eyeballed the SCP against the Milky Way and LMC/SMC) so the stars were already eggy at one minute (hence the crazy ISO).
In case any other fellow beginners are interested, I've posted a straight-out-of-camera sub that has no processing other than RAW conversion and resizing. I've also posted a screen shot of DSS when it was finished stacking. I imported the Autosave.tif file into Photoshop, stretched the histogram using Levels (48, 1.10, 125), added a bit of Saturation (+15), resized and saved.
Just for kicks, here's a straight-out-of-camera shot of the Flame and Horsehead Nebula through my 132 mm apo refractor taken in my light polluted back yard. Can anyone even spot the Horsehead?
