First Light 300D Sag widefield

[MrB (Simon)]

It's not just a first light, it's a first everything.
Never done this before, so please be gentle with me

Anyway, this was shot early Sun morning with 70% moon.
It is a stack(DSS) of two, one 30sec exposure and one 60sec, both at 400ASA. No darks, no flats. Shot in JPEG mode, forgot about RAW.... D'OH!
Postprocessing? Did some fiddling with it in Photoshop, but I really have no idea what I'm doing!!
No cropping, just reduced in size to meet IIS 200k limit, never realised how much effect this limit has on image quality!
Gear? 300D with Baader UV/IR cut filter, Pentax SMC Takumar 55/1.8 stopped down to f4. (probably too far)

Please feel free to comment, need all the help I can get!
Thanks for looking,
Simon

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Simon, for a first one you've done extremely well.
It looks rather red on my monitor, but that can be fixed in Photoshop by adjusting the saturation right down.
Increasing your highlights will bring out more of the starfield and show up the dust lanes more.
Hope you don't mind, but I've made some adjustments to your original image using Paint Shop Pro.

[MrB (Simon)]

Thanks Jeanette,
I don't mind at all... it's actually very helpfull, shows just how red mine was!
Every time I tried to reduce the redness, it seemed to lose all its brightness too.
I have lots to learn!

Itching to get back out there, do more lights and this time some darks and flats too.... and shoot in RAW.
This was really just me finding focus(hit and miss) and finding my limits with exposures before tracking problems and LP bites.
Out of all of them there were two half decent lights.

Thanks again.

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

LOL I took my first set of RAW images last night.
I've been happy with what I've been getting using .jpegs, cause I'm just learning too.

[CoolhandJo (Paul)]

Great shot Simon! I think its great. Good detail and I like the dust lanes.