The Helix planetary nebula in Aquarius - taken in rural NW Vic last Saturday night -2degC...brrr. Haven't taken the scope out since Feb and had to prevent another winter passing me by.
With tiny snow briefly falling before midnight I soon afterwards shot this image under clear sky using 52x30sec exposures at ISO1600 Prime focus & my modded Canon 60D. Packed up and jumped back in the ute with the heater blaring trying to thaw out my fingers...
Hi Nino,
There is a free download software called Deep Sky Stacker (DSS).
Very common and easy program to use, upload your subs including darks and flats if you choose and it will register frames to create a tif file to export.
You can do minor processing within DSS to align RGB histogram and basic luminance and saturation shifts.
A
You gotta be keen to get out under those conditions. Natural sensor cooling, hey! Nice rich colours and detail coming through, well done and with such short subs. You can't beat dark skies. Did you use any filters with this shot? I like it
Thankyou for your comments Mickoid and Chris,
I didn't use any filters for this shot. I thought that imaging under a dark sky would be optimal to take in unimpeded light. I have a UV/IR cut filter and a Hutech LP filter that I like to use in suburban skies but didn't think it would be Necessary.I could be wrong though. One thing is for sure the DSLR didn't suffer from the usual heat build up! Chris, I would have liked to take more subs but as is the case it took me what felt like an eternity to get the Newtonian setup polar aligned and balanced ready to go. It always seems that way when youre setup in unfamiliar territory. But none the less 26min gave a result that I could be happy with. Besides, I didn't have much more incentive after midnight the temp dropped below zero and I was beginning to lose feeling in my fingers and toes hehehe.
