[wayne anderson (Wayne)]

Shots taken from a dark site at Pratten QLD on 12/11/2012
The sky was very dark and almost perfect seeing, I spent so much time absorbed in viewing with the eyepieces that I only had time to shoot this one object before packing up.

90 x 20sec subs at ISO 1600
20 Darks, Flats and Bias
Stacked in DSS

12” LX200 (alt/az setup no guiding)
Sony Nex-3 Camera

To stack the 90 files for a change I set DSS to Median Kappa-Sigma Clipping (Kappa 2.0 & 10 iterations) for all Lights, Flats, Darks and Bias, then processed the stacked file in Corel Photo-Paint 7 ( release 1996, its an old program but works ok for now)

Amazing, I was not expecting this result there was only 30 minutes of data from 20 second subs (20 secs keeps field rotation smaller) and the scope was in alt/az mode with no guiding at all, just standard tracking and no PEC training (I will need to learn to do this soon)

Later I will try using a de-rotator or wedge with auto-guiding and good polar aligning to improve the results, then get a better camera, for now this setup will have to do (no $$ for astro gear or new software)