Eta Carina 23/03/2013

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

Best I could come up with. Moon light effected image along with Light Pollution and an Unmodded camera.... 10 x 60s ISO800 Unguided. Aligned and stacked with DSS. Colours adjusted in Photoshop using Noel Carboni's Actions, with small crop to remove small amount of field rotation). Canon 400D (unmodded) 80mm F450mm Refractor, HEQ5Pro

[multiweb (Marc)]

Beautiful shot. Unguided you say? Very nice.

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

Thanks Marc, yep unguided, I used a program called EQAlign to polar align the mount and I think the field rotation came from me not leveling the mount accurately before hand.. I only got a small amount of drift on a 300sec exposure, which would either be drift or PE. Since I have not fully done a PE correction on the mount yet.

[multiweb (Marc)]

Originally Posted by Astroman

Thanks Marc, yep unguided, I used a program called EQAlign to polar align the mount and I think the field rotation came from me not leveling the mount accurately before hand.. I only got a small amount of drift on a 300sec exposure, which would either be drift or PE. Since I have not fully done a PE correction on the mount yet.

You should start looking into auto-guiding. It's not rocket science and will make your life a lot easier. 300s with no trailing is pretty cool though. Excellent actually. Never got anything over 2min unguided at 600mm.

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

Actually I do auto guide, but last night I was testing the systems without it.

[Ross G]

Great looking shot Andrew.

Good luck.

Ross.

[gavcol (G)]

Andrew

Great job, very inspiring for me.

Gives me an idea of what mine should look like!

Regards

Gav

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

Thanks Gavin.