1st light on SBIG OSC

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Hi everyone,

After months of tearing my hair out, I've finally got my head around some of the complexities of imaging with my SBIG 8300c CCD. This result is from a few stacked 5 min exposures and darks, guided with PHD, Orion SSAG on a 120 ED refractor, mounted on an EQ6.

With special thanks to some good advice from an experienced ASV member, I've managed to capture & pre-process this with Nebulosity on the Macbook, and post process in Photoshop.

Still a long way to go, I know... and I need to get a better focuser and a flattener.

BTW: What do you recommend for dew heaters? It's chilly in Melbourne right now.

Thanks for looking

Warmly

Andy

[batema (Mark)]

I think it looks great. Good colour and smooth for only a few shots. Well done.

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Looks good, Andy!

[scagman (John)]

Ni Andy, That is a nice image.
I agree about te temp in melb at the moment. I use kendrick for my dew contol and am happy with the results.

Cheers

[Peter Ward]

Nice start Andy. Suggest you try at least 10 minute subs, this will see the S/N improve quite a bit.

[Spookyer (Brett)]

Looks good already and I am sure you will only get better with more experience

[stevous67 (Steve M)]

Hello Andy,

That's a fine start indeed! Longer sub exposures will smooth out your data, just as long as you are comfortable guiding for longer periods. There are a few economical dew heater solutions, perhaps the entry level kendrick unit with the 4 outputs, and 2 dial controls, combined with their black range of heaterband would be good. Their blue range uses a lower quality resistance strip that is far less durable.

Regards

Steve

[Garbz (Chris)]

Andy is this a the full frame from the camera or a crop to one side? It looks like something in the scope is misaligned. Notice the stars are sharper on the right than the left? Or if it's just a crop from the side of the image then it's really just a case of a flattener.

Also your image has a bit of a green tinge. There's a free plugin for Photoshop that nails it in one button press that I used early on here: http://www.deepskycolors.com/archivo...sta-green.html

Otherwise a respectable shot!

[Andy01 (Andy)]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks so much for your kind words, much appreciated It's very nice to get some positive results and encouraging feedback after trying for so long to get a result.

I'll see if my rig can hold up with longer subs, but as I'm shooting from suburban Melbourne, I might have more success with that under dark skies - but I'll give it a try at 10 mins.

Garbz, the image was slightly cropped on the left hand side. Agree a flattener is required, any recommendations? Unfortunately I can't use HLVG as its written for PC only and I'm a mac guy.

Warmly

Andy