Again last night, I had my usual amount of trouble getting guiding to work, after 4hrs with no success I gave it the flick, and ran off a heap of 4 minute unguided shots of M42 and M43.
This has resulted in what I think is my best shot yet.
Details:
Scope: Megrez 102
Camera: QHY8 (Gain: 1 ; Offset: 116)
22x240sec subs
Stacked in DSS, Processing in PS CS3
You think this is good now, and it is, well you would be gob smaked if you had used flats, do you take flats? Even rudamentary flats would improve this image, just pointing the scope at a piece of white card illuminated by a diffuse fluro light would make a difference, not an ideal flat but probably enough to remove much of that vignetting.
Very nice. Did you take these from a relatively dark site? If not try longer exposures and try lowering your offset to let's say 70 to start with. That will considerably lower your sky count.
Thanks guys... After stretching these I realized straight away that I will need flats... Also would have helped if I remembered to use the field flattener..
Mark, From where I took these, You can't see the milky way, about mag 4~5 is the limit.. Light pollution is paramount.. I'll give lowering the Offset a go.. the background level is something that I struggled with, untill I just said "stuff it... it still looks good."
I will also try raising the black point. since posting the image I have given it a bit of a contrast tweak anyways as it looked a little wishy washy..
Thanks for the comments guys.. Hopefully autoguiding will be sorted by the weekend.
Thanks Gary, as far as extra tweaks go, can you point me in the direction of anything other than flats / black point? Im very new to all this and although im coming along pretty quickly any extra info is always appreciated.
You think this is good now, and it is, well you would be gob smaked if you had used flats, do you take flats? Even rudamentary flats would improve this image, just pointing the scope at a piece of white card illuminated by a diffuse fluro light would make a difference, not an ideal flat but probably enough to remove much of that vignetting.
Again last night, I had my usual amount of trouble getting guiding to work, after 4hrs with no success I gave it the flick, and ran off a heap of 4 minute unguided shots
That's impressive for unguided. I'm lucky to get 120sec without guiding before I detect trails.
PixInsight will help you with the vignetting, a Dynamic Background Extraction will clean it up nicely. Or like others are suggesting, some real flats.
Thanks all for the comments, I am very happy with the image despite the vignetting. I did download Pixinsight LE to try to get rid of it, but Dynamic Background Extraction was not included in LE (or at least, not where any of the tutorials said it would be...)
I'll have another look when I get home from work...
Thanks Craig... I kind of cheated there.. It was late and I forgot to run off 30x30sec exposures... So I re-stacked the 240 sec exposures and stretched them VERY gently, then added them to the fully stretched data using layer masks, adjusted the color balance and tweaked the curves a little more, and it came out very natural looking.
Matty, Thanks mate.. I'm very keen to see what it can all do also... Should have it sorted by the end of this weekend, failing that, my EQDIR will be here in a few days/weeks and then I'll be rocking out with pulseguiding
Should have it sorted by the end of this weekend, failing that, my EQDIR will be here in a few days/weeks and then I'll be rocking out with pulseguiding 
