Lagoon Nebula - starting to see positive results.

[enaiman (Eugen)]

A night with just a few clouds - quite a rare sight in Hobart - and I am finally starting to get positive results. Even with so many tutorials available on Youtube, there will be still little bits of knowledge missing which are absolutely essential for beginners.
I was going crazy about my guiding not working - I was selecting a star for guiding and just seconds into calibration the mount will move by a large amount and the star would be lost. I couldn't figure what was wrong and I was trying lots of different things without seeing any improvement ... until I I dropped the slewing speed from maximum to something like 8x and I was finally able to do a proper calibration.
Now it makes sense but 1 day ago I was still in the dark. Anyway, I will get better in time

One of the targets I tried last night which gave pretty good results was the Lagoon Nebula. I have only taken maybe 3 or 4 exposures starting from 60s up to 5 mins. No darks, no flats, no bias, no stacking - just a single image lightly processed in Photoshop.
For now, I am happy I am able to take 5 min exposures next will come getting to know my camera better and dialling in the settings, taking enough light frames, darks, flats ... and stacking.

All in good time

[rocco57au (Rocky)]

That's a really good result... you're on the right track, just keep adding more data

[PKay (Peter)]

Hi Eugen

Yes all in good time, plus one step at a time.

It can take many sessions until you get things dialled in.

I have spent 4 sessions just doing polar alignment as an example.

Good result and well done

[AdamJL]

Great stuff, Eugen

You've got nice star shapes and colours across the image. Keep going!!

You're right, this is a very difficult hobby for beginners. A lot of that is down to the size of the market. This isn't the most popular of hobbies amongst the general population and (dare I say it... don't be angry!) the general demographic is one that might not be keen to do lots of YouTube tutorials (so not many YouTube channels).

That said, there are a few up and coming younger people to keep an eye out on YouTube, and hopefully we'll get more new blood into the hobby which will in turn help beginners like yourself (and me!) with upskilling quickly.
And products like the ASIAIR will only continue that trend.

[enaiman (Eugen)]

Thank you guys for your comments
In the last few days I have upped my game and managed to get a decent set of exposures (about 70 exposures of 300s). Took also some calibration frames and had my first steps in Pixinsight.

Sort of a rushed processing tonight - pretty happy with the overall result and not so happy with the number of stars in the image.

I will definitely go back in the next few days and hopefully I will get a better result.

Here is is a shot of Lagoon Nebula and Trifid Nebula in the same frame.