Well i had a go at Drift alignment, but i think i need to work on it a bit more. But i have the idea of it now. Also took some time to work out how to setup long exposures on the DragonflyExpress. I spent most of the night working on alignment, drift, and learning to work the NGC-MAX in equatorial mode. I think i will need to work on my setup routine and hopefully practice will make perfect.
At the end of it i took some quick single long exposure shots of M42 and a cluster of galaxies clockwise on the left NGC3373, NGC3384, NGC3379 and on the far right NGC3368. Also limited by clouds moving through. Tried some others like the Horse head but only manged to get a faint bit of the flame.
These are just experimental shots, but i did mange to learn a bit of Curves, levels etc using Canon's provided software Digital Photo Professional. This program though not as functional as Photoshop has a very easy to understand and use tool pallet for curves etc. You can see the RGB channels lose alignment as you apply curves and the line them up easily by adding curves to individual channels.
Fahim, does the Dragonfly do Long exposures normally, or have you fiddled with it to make it take long exposures.
The reason I ask is coz I don't know what a Dragonfly is capable of, and I think I must have missed something in your explanation
Ken sorry the DFE was used for the drift alignment only. It can do long exposures up to 60seconds i think. But the images were taken with the Canon EOS 400D, i guess i should have made that clear.
I think everybody in here should do an "Auto Levels" in photoshop though. Takes away the gray "cloud" over the image and leaves it with the nice black background, stars, and more brilliant colors.
