Long time since posting - this is not a particularly good image of M8 and M20 and a crop of the whole.
80mins of useful data out of 4 hours+ of imaging from a small country town in Victoria - the sky was spectacular between large pools of cloud.
Equipment as below... the cooling failed (now fixed) but the fan and heat sink kept the cold finger at 2 - 3C - roughly ambient. Not bad.
To keep stars small and separated, I have been experimenting with low ISOs. 4 minutes at iso400 seems OK with better results at iso200 - longer exposures a few hours of data and very good guiding required. I'll keep working at this, plus a few other ideas I have in mind.
The image is under sampled - pixel size vs FL is not ideal. The camera is also tilted. Eggy stars left side. Need to fix this. The focus tube needs support when using a flattener. I forget this on the odd occasion it gets some use.
So just about everything imaginable. Dithering and careful calibration probably rescued it and made it more of a learning event.
There you go Alex... very much in keeping with your philosophy of posting our best and our worse.
No good it has stars.
You should be very happy as you have produced a very fine image.
The folk very advanced in this game can always find something to do better and I think that may intimidate many..I don't worry personally as I know in this game improvement is an ongoing process.
If you want to find out just how decent your images are..you and everyone reading really..just show one to the check out girl or the guy at the bottle shop and see what they say...the marriage proposals I get because of showing my photos you would not believe...and rightly so because I would be telling fibs...they want to ask but I guess they are too shy. Keep some photos on your phone so you can share them with complete strangers.
Great image and thank you for sharing.
Alex
Hi Alex. It's interesting to try different methods and think outside conventions. And largely a pig headed decision to persist with a dslr and find ways around inherent limitations.Particularly with older cameras. I just enjoy innovation in cheap kind of way - DIY.
Martin image scale as in the attached screenshots. Of course this is affected by seeing. FYI - the most suitable camera for proper sampling with my widefield setup is akin to the 183M/C ZWO or QHY. Pixel pitch 2.4um..
I captured Lagoon a few weeks back & all those stars made my image look really noisy to my eyes... however, where you have both nebula & the rich star field around them it looks beautiful
