Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Because I had difficulties getting a very decent polar alignment at first and later various teething problems with my auto guiding I found I was going for very short exposures and also very high gain ( more than one should use)... Short exposures became the norm, 30 seconds up to 90 seconds but at some point I seemed to find I would go for 45 to 60 seconds. And gain ( zwo 1600 mono) up to 450 for HA but finally this settled at 250 to 350...all way way past where one should be... And still no darks or flats so within this approach there is room for improvement by incorporating darks and flats...however I do two things...cull any sub that is not great and stack heaps...Often I stack 500 but have stacked just under 700 and some of these I have used "drizzle" which I feel improves my result...but a huge stack and 3 times drizzle has the computer going all night...I use Startools which really seems to tidy up the noise...to me the results are acceptable but probably would draw negative comments from folk more skilled...but I am happy and really thats all I care about.
Because I am colour blind my asperations are low...that will always hold me back so I dont get too serious.
I have a RASA 11 inch coming and a ZWO mono 2600 which I plan to explore short exposures with...my belief is the shorter the exposures the more you will pick and choose and I guess I have developed a similar philosophy to the guy making the video in that you will get both good and bad moments of seeing..just pick 1000 good ones to stack 
Here is a Lagoon captured with short exposures and high gain that I have been playing with..I realise it is off in many aspects, particularly colour but I think the detail is not too bad...which is what I look for..anyways this turned out better than the one I did using 2 minute exposures, which I have lost otherwise would post it to compare.
Alex |
Alex
I agree totally with shorter subs and more of them
You lower the risk to your subs for tracking error, guiding error , wind gusts , seeing and transparency conditions , satellite trails , passing cloud etc.... and can still process good images, you just need lots of data
Great detail by the way on your M8 , proof that it actually works ......
Some of my best images have come from shorter guided subs ( 90 sec to 3 minutes ) IMO unless you have a +$7K mount ( most of us don’t ) and want to go really deep with the longer focal length rigs, 5 to 10 minute subs or longer are too risky and totally dependent on atmospheric conditions
I’m imaging at 1000mm and 90 sec to 3 minutes works well amongst the objects that I image , if conditions are really good I might go 5 minute but that’s on rare occasions
There’s a guy in Japan who has a YouTube channel ( Cuiv the lazy geek ) and he images galaxies under Bortle 9 , takes hundreds of 60 sec and 90 sec subs just using a Luminance filter and produces absolutely incredible Galaxy images
Cheers
Martin