M17 region from last night

[Prickly]

Hi All,

Michael (Tilt) and I took this image last night.

30x1min (ICNR on) ISO400
unmodded 350D
tracked but not guided
135mm (canon 70-200mm zoom)

Taken from the outskirts of Canberra whilst inside drinking coffee.
Connection to inside computer via wireless router to laptop outside! Image plus controlled the imaging via the camera.

We sat back and watched it unfold on deep sky stacker. Then came the clouds..

On the original you can even see details within the Eagle nebula.

Cheers
David

[renormalised (Carl)]

Nicely done

[AlexN]

Oh my! Your tracking setup seems to be dead accurate! Stunningly sharp image, What aperture was it shot at?

Excellent image! Well done.

[gregbradley]

Very nice image.

I plan to do that wireless remote, I bought a wireless router too and have yey to use it. Any tricks to it?

Very handy in winter.

Greg.

[AlexN]

if you use RDP (remote desktop protocol) the desktop system you use inside shows the desktop of the remote computer (ie: the laptop outside attached to the scope..) use the notebook as you would as if you were right in front of it... its pretty easy! and as seen here, VERY effective

[jase (Jason)]

Good work David. The wide field displays interesting surroundings of the two targets amongst the star clouds. Well done.

[Prickly]

Hi Alex,

Michael was the technical expert with the networking but let me tell you it was really freezing outside last night. Good for the camera chip but not so good for humans! We were very happy to be sitting inside in the warm. So very effective from this angle too. Only thing you need to keep an eye out for clouds.

We worked out where south is and just polar allign the Eq6 through the polar scope. This is pretty good for low focal length photos - we get about 1-2mins. We had trained the PEC too (why not!). It took us all of 5mins to find the asterism (4 to realise you have to pull the counterweight shaft out too see through the polarscope - I'll take the credit for that one!). After that a 1 star allign and we were plain sailing.

Thanks Jase. It was fascinating the number of objects we could see in the image and fun to watch the detail emerging in front of our eyes. Challenging keeping the background / dust details without overexposing the nebula is a real challenge. I daresay it would be possible to do better with the processing -must read up more on how this can be best done. Not nearly up to the cosmicphotos standards yet - but its all good fun learning.

Michael might be able to give a few more details on how we did all the networking and computer communications.

Cheers,
David

[skeltz (Rob)]

Nice going there dave,sounds like you really roughed it eh?

[Tilt (Michael)]

Ok, the details were like this:

Got the 350D going on the EQ6 with the 70-200 f2.8, we were at 135mm @ f2.8 with an ISO of 400.

Plugged the 350D into the laptop running ImagesPlus, set the image run and then departed back into a warm house where coffee and biscuits waited. Essentially from there it was just tapping into the notebook outside via wireless link to retrieve the images. Simple and very effective.

Used Deep Sky Stacker and stacked the frames as they came in, the only problem with sitting inside is that we didn't see the cloud approaching and that pretty much shut down the imaging for the night.

Need to look into some type of autoguiding soon, need longer exposures

[RB (Andrew)]

Beautiful image, great tracking, very sharp detail.

[Matty P (Matt)]

A lovely image. Nice and sharp.

A feast to the eyes.

Well done.

[gregbradley]

Thanks for the tip.

Greg.


quote=AlexN;340538]if you use RDP (remote desktop protocol) the desktop system you use inside shows the desktop of the remote computer (ie: the laptop outside attached to the scope..) use the notebook as you would as if you were right in front of it... its pretty easy! and as seen here, VERY effective[/quote]