My first ever astrophotograph!

[Eternal]

And it's out of focus!!!

It's Eta Carina taken from my heavily light polluted unit in Bankstown. The equipment details are as follows:

Telescope: Skywatcher 8" Newtonian
Mount: Skywatcher EQ5 (slightly overloaded)
Guidescope: Skywatcher 70x700mm Refractor
Guide Camera: Logitech Quickcam Pro 5000 with Bintel 0.5 focal reducer
Guide Software: Guidedog with Shoestring Astronomy Autoguide mods done to EQ5 Dual Access Controller.
Main Camera: Canon EOS 400D (prime focus) with 2" UHC-S Baader filter attached.
Imaging: 10 x 30 second exposures at ISO800, 5 x darks, 5 x offsets, no flats.
Image Processing: Images stacked in DeepSkyStacker and enhanced in Photoshop CS2.

I'm not very happy with it to be honest. Particularly considering I spent a good hour trying to drift align my scope (not helped by the fact I do not have a good view of the eastern or western horizon). Hopefully I'll do better next time.

[leon]

Hey Eternal, don't be disheartened, you should have seen mine when i had my first go, bloody awful, good effort i reckon, and it will only get better, well done.

Cheers Leon

[sheeny (Al)]

Hey, nothing wrong with that for a first attempt! I can still take worse than that! Good work!

Al.

[Ric]

Dont worry Eternal, it's a good start and you have an image you can say is yours.
I've deleted more than I've kept.

Cheers

[skeltz (Rob)]

Keep at it mate your bound to improve..everyone started somewhere, you have taken the plunge,thats the main thing...and hey with more images you will get better...now get out there and shoot some more images....chow

[h0ughy (David)]

I would be jumping out of my skin with that as my first shot!!! (mind you I haven't moved on too far from that either?

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

Hey you could call it the Bankstown Blood Bath

You have some really nice equipment so keep at it, they "will" get better, trust me!

Here is my first ever astroimage (of anything) taken with a CCD camera in mid 2003:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...00338/original

This was taken April 2004 using same scope and camera:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...14732/original

And this is what it looked like by April 2006:

http://www.pbase.com/strongmanmike20...59146120/large

Mike

[Garyh]

A good start I think there!!! remember you only done very short subs and all that light pollution to boot..keep it up its all uphill
Cheers Gary

[spearo (Frank)]

Hi Eternal,
Welcome to the very addictive club!
Nice work for a first shot. I totaly agree with others' sentiments and best wishes.
You'll do very well with the equipment you have. With your autoguiding setup (and goodish drift alignment) you'll be able to get much longer exposures to reveal more from the nebulae.
Great start, look forward to more images from you
cheers
frank

[atalas]

Hi Eternal

Your being way hard on yourself dude,It's a great effort for your first and It only gets better .
I'm in Bankstown myself so If you want any help in acquisition and processing just email me and I'll be glad to help out.

[tornado33]

yes thats great for a first ever astrophoto, especially under light pollution.
Scott

[Eternal]

Thankyou everyone for your encouraging comments. I tried again to photograph Eta Carina last Friday. I started setting up 21:00 on Friday night and packed it up at 4:30 Saturday morning with nothing to show for my efforts.

The problem I had was with my mount, it is severly overloaded and depending what position it is in it has a tendancy to jump. Also, regardless of how much I tighten the cogs on the motors and RA and DEC axis they're still to loose, resulting in a significant delay (1 - 2 seconds) whenever I want to adjust the RA or DEC.

I suppose if I were the patient kind of guy I could have sat there and manually guided. I ummed and ahhed about how I could go about fixing my mount but no matter which way I looked at it it was always going to be overloaded.

I could have gooten rid of the 400D and just used those webcam imagers to do my photography thus allowing it to double as a guide camera but, no offence to those who use them, the images they produce are just no where near as good as those produced by DSLR's. As such I am always going to need a seperate guidescope and hence the weight issue all over again.

My solution? I purchased a HEQ5 from Bintel on Saturday. After I regrease it and puchase another 5.2kg weight I should be ready to get crackin this Friday/Saturday (moon be dammed!!!)

[atalas]

Congrats on your new mount dude ! I had one of those a couple of years back and can say that they are a good mount .

[Phil]

great first photo. My first photo was of star trail. That should have been pin point star. Well done.
Phil