On the last new moon (11th January), my friend from Karate (Derek) came to the Pony Club with us to check out the night sky and do a bit of astrophotography.
I had planned to do an all-nighter with my ED80+350D, but my laptop had only just been rebuilt, and nothing was working properly on it (XP SP2 hadn't been installed). So I gave up, and aligned the mount as best I could (with as much patience as I had after finding out nothing worked).
So those plans ruined, we used Derek's Canon 40D + 70-200 f/2.8 IS USM lens, piggybacked on the ED80 to do some widefields of the LMC and Eta Carinae.
So here's the results of that session, finally.
No guiding, roughly 10 exposures of between 3 to 5 minutes each, ISO1600, ICNR was used, no flats.
We had been playing around with Live View but couldn't get it or remote shooting working through his Mac at the time (his first night out with the camera), so we used a cabled shutter release.
Stacked in DeepSkystacker (the only thing I had that would recognise the 40D RAW files), and processed in Photoshop.
The images came out very noisy - it was a warm night, and ISO1600 was used, which didn't help, but perhaps the playing around with LiveView (which was still on the laptop) made it worse.
I'm fairly pleased with how they came out, considering the whole night was almost ruined. Thanks to Derek for the use of his camera and lens - what a beast it was! Trying to balance it was very difficult given the orientation and weight of the lens.
Hoping it clears for this weekend so I can have a go through my ED80.
However, you guys soldiered on in the true spirit of amateur astro photography and managed to save the day (night?). I particularly like the LMC shot. Is Derek hooked on astronomy now?
Two great images Mike. Especially like the LMC. Though both images appear to have quite high background brightness. Not sure if this was done on purpose to bring out as much nebulosity as possible. I think raising the black point would improve contrast. Trial and error.
Yep I agree the LMC is a great shot, my personal view of this star cloud is darker background, but that is probably only me, however they both came up very well indeed.
