I hope I have progressed from NOOB :)

[LewisM]

I think my astrophotography has gone leaps and bounds in the past month. From simple, really cruddy photos, to something I think I can FINALLY show here in the Big Boy forum

Hard to believe this is merely a stack of 5 (yes 5!) lights, ISO 400 / 180 secs. Guided by an Orion Starshoot. 2 darks, 2 flats. Stacked them in DSS, adjusted significantly from the initial output in DSS, and minor tweaking in PS 5.1 and a litl in StarTools. Canon 5DMkII, totally unmodified and not cooled (my peltier failed - rebuilding it), with APT controlling. CMOS temp did not exceed 21° last night even once - it was a PERFECT seeing night here on the Sunshine Coast, QLD - I have not seen a night like it in MONTHS. Tonight may be the same - hope to add astack more data for NGC 6726 (R Corona Australis) and M 42 - maybe a stack of 30 for M42.

I love the dust lanes and the amount of white cloud nebulosity a lot of people unfortunately edit out - I think it needs to be there to show the true MASSIVE extent of the Orion complex. I plan doing a complete Orion mosaic eventually (got my first truly successful Horsehead shots last night)

Anyway, let me know what you think, how to imrove etc. Adding more exposures will help eradicate a bit of the noise - denoising it removes too much detail at this low stack count. I will throw the full image on my webpage later to show it as compared to the lossy preview here.

Constructive criticism GREATLY appreciated!

http://imageshack.us/a/img84/6476/m42ea.png

[sheeny (Al)]

Looking good Lewis.

Have you done anything to the diffraction spikes, or is that just how they come from your system? They look quite heavy very close the the star.

M42 can always be a challenge... if you want to take it up, try stacking some different exposures to try to get the trapezium to pop out without losing the detail in the darker nebulae (or a bit of HDR).

The full mosaic of Orion sounds like a worthy project!

Al.

[LewisM]

That's how the spikes come from the Vixen VC200L, and that is with custom thinned vanes. I can tone them down a bit, but as I said, processed this one VERY little. ALL my stacking software is giving me troubles lately - Registax will NOT work V6 on my system (V5 will, but not the best software). DSS always outputs greyscale no matter HOW I try, and MaxIM DL hates my darks/flats/biases, so end up with noisey originals. Got to read more

[Kunama]

Lot of progress is a short time, well done.

[LewisM]

Hmmm, really odd, but after restarting windows, it looks 100000000000 times DIFFERENT - and not in a good way!

[LewisM]

Here's a processed version. Less background nebulosity. (compressed to heck and back thanks to this forum software)

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Looking good, Lewis!

[LewisM]

Last one way over processed to me... re-uploaded the original at imageshack

[Screwdriverone (Chris)]

Those are looking great Lewis, you are doing well!

The first one looks better, more natural.

When you save for IIS, resize the Tiff file to 1024 x something and then save it as a JPEG. My 1000D files just make it under 200kb without any compression reduction in details...

Also, get a dropbox or other website photo storage space, that way, you can link to the big pic without having to post a compressed version only. I normally put in a reduced one here for those who want a quick squiz without a big download needed.

Keep it up, these results, as you say, are coming in leaps and bounds.

Cheers

Chris

[sheeny (Al)]

What Chris said.

You have the tools, and you're going well.

Al.

[LewisM]

Hey, stop calling me a tool