Having received my new scope last week the weather set in, of course, and had the opportunity to take my first images over the weekend. The guide scope is a W/O Petzval 70mm as shown in the fist two photos.
All shots were taken with a Canon 400D unmodified, guided with PHD and stacked and processed using DSS and GIMP. Apart from the Lagoon all were first attempts and I could not be happier with the results and the scope. I did have issues with guiding on NGC253 as it was almost overhead and the scope did not want to guide but otherwise has been perfect.
Lagoon:11 x 7 min lights, 5 x 7 min darks at ISO 400.
NGC253:2 x 7 min lights, 2 x 7 min darks at ISO 800.
M31:5 x 6 min lights, 2 x 6 min darks at ISO 800.
Horsehead nebula:4 x 7 min lights, 2 x 7 min darks at ISO 800.
Any suggestions on how to improve processing would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for looking.
Your shots look very good. Stacking more subs will help reduce noise. I also sometime use noiseware professional which is a photoshop plugin from imagenomic and does a great job at reducing it further.
