Attempted my first galaxy (ngc253) on Friday night. Same conditions as M42/43 in this forum, except that 1x10min and 3x5min shots stacked. Darks subtracted - no other manipulation. I was pleasantly surprised at the dust lanes apparent in the galaxy. Im beginning to get a hang on processing as I now find Picture Window Pro to be very easy to align photos and stack them together.
Thanks for the nice comments. That along with M42/43 and the flame nebula shot were my first serious attempts to do DSLR shots. I need more practice with all the equipment in the dark. Its amazing how the complexity of a simple task goes up when the lights go down. I took the shots at Leyburn and since there was no power everything was running on batteries. I was just happy that the new version 3 handset was placing objects on the chip of the 350D using the HEQ5-Pro mount. Other equipment was an old Celestron 8"SCT withf6.3 focal reducer. Autoguided with 70x500mm refractor using toucam pro and Guidemaster software. Really great program in version 1.1.100beta. Guided the mount to +/-2 arc sec for at least 10 min. Had no guiding issues all night.
But the next thing is to bring DSLR focus on line as I havn't nailed focussing as yet and composition at the chip does still need something to be desired. I have to figure which way to move the mount, to move the object on the DSLR chip.
