Had another great night last night, feel like I'm learning somethibg every time i go out.
My daughter and i were zooming all over the sky, perfectly aligned, goto was perfect. We visited about 15 DSOs, took some pics, but didnt have thr patience to spend too long on any single spot.
Here is a pic of the southern pinwheel galaxy, with about 10mins of 20 and 30sec exposure in it at iso 800 and 30seconds at 3200. My first time stacking and my first time using gimp. Quick question, i assume i am getting the red, green and blue streaks because I'm pushing the processing so hard to show light, and i need to do that because I'm not getting enough exposures? I hope its not a bodgie sensor on my dslr?
Anyway, tonight my goal is at least an hour of data on something. We had a similar amount of time on a bunch of pleanetary and emission nebula, a whole heap of galaxies... it was really the best... both us huddled around the camera waiting for that first high iso exposure to confirm we were on target, then "whooaaaaaa!!!!" When it comes out.
Good to see you are off to a good start. The coloured spots are just hot pixels, darks should remove them. Your stacker program aligns the stars movement between each frame but the hot pixels are static on the sensor they don't follow the same alignment as the stars. Hot pixels are pretty normal (unless you have hundreds). Your polar alignment might be out a tadd so your stars are drifting a bit between frames, but if your polar alignment is good then the tracking speed might be a fraction slow or fast, I had similar problems with hot pixel streaking before I started auto guiding.
