First effort

[Vermin (Tom)]

It has been a while since I have posted here as I have been unable to do much in the way of astronomy due to work commitments overseas.
Lately I've been back at the ep and tonight I had my first go at some astrophotography.
Looking through the wonderful images in this forum I'm a bit embarrassed to post them but hope to get some advice on how to improve.

Here's the album: http://imgur.com/a/V78Dw

Note that the 2nd image is mislabelled. It's not the Trifid nebula. It's the Carinae Nebula (NGC 3372).

Scope: 16" f5.2 Dobsonian with ServoCat and ArgoNavis.

Camera: Canon 5D Mk II with a 2x Barlow lens. Exposure details in the album.

Seeing was awful, 2/5 ( http://i.imgur.com/TqMxy10.gif ). Saturn was particularly bad as I was imaging over my house's roof.

Suburban back yard light pollution levels in Blackmans Bay, Tasmania.

I tried doing some EP projection but could not get the camera to focus on either a 35mm Panoptic or 17mm Nagler in a ScopeTronix MaxView DSLR II. So all imaging was done at prime focus with a 2x Barlow required to reach focus.

Obviously I can do better but I feel it wasn't bad for a first effort.

Next thing I think I need to get going is BackyardEOS to do some stacking but any advice is appreciated.

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Very good shots Tom! I especially liked Cent A.

[Vermin (Tom)]

Thanks Kevin.

[Screwdriverone (Chris)]

Pretty good for single images Tom,

You might want to change the Trifid label to Eta Carinae though....

Cheers

Chris

[Screwdriverone (Chris)]

Oh, sorry,

I just saw you had done just that in the original post. Sorry...

As you were!

Cheers

Chris

[raymo]

Good first try Tom, but assuming that you haven't bought Backyard EOS
yet, why not use Deep Sky Stacker and Registax [free] until you have
climbed a little further up the learning curve.
raymo

[Vermin (Tom)]

Thanks for the advice raymo. I'll take a look at them though I thought they were just post processing applications? I liked the idea of the focussing meter and ability to automate captures with BYEOS.

[raymo]

Fair enough.
raymo