This is my first season of astrophotography, so each deep sky target is very much new and exiting while I have the training wheels on.
Pic below was captured with modded 450D through ED80 on HEQ5Pro.
ISO800 with 20 x 30sec light frames plus a single dark in Melb on Jan 17th (50% moon). Stacked using DSS.
Getting the hang of Levels and Curves in Photoshop cs3, but have not yet mastered layers from various exposure durations. No hurry ... enjoying the journey.
Next toy will hopefully be a field flattener to snaz up the stars near the edge of field for large targets.
Well done on your first image Jeff. There's no turning back now.
I suggest that you raise the white point as the image is black clipped. There is a lot of hidden data which is not showing as a result. Apart from that everything else looks good.
Jeff,
well done mate. Lovely shot for a first image.
Stars are nice and round, focus seems spot on, with 30sec subs i think your polar alignment must be pretty good too if not spot on. The field flattener is almost not needed, star elongation on the edges is minimal- good scope!
Good advice from Matt. The key obviously will be to move to longer and longer subs to capture more and more data. autoguiding will help.
Good to see the bug has gotten somebody else.
Well done and about time Jeff. When is your divorce planned for? You have now entered the realm of the poor. Cheap astro goodies are a thing of the past.
The field flattener for the ED80 is the William Optics PflatII if you can still get them. They work a treat.
Top first effort Jeff. Very well done. You have the scope pointing and tracking well. I hope you don't mind, but I've attached a quick rework where all I've done is move the centre slider in the levels tool slightly to the left and voila - your detail starts to come out. It'll work much better at your end with the original data.
Nice start Jeff and welcome to the world of astro-imaging!! As a fairly recent entrant myself (2007) I can tell you there's a lot to learn, especially on the processing front. I learn something new every time it seems!!
As Chris demonstrated, looks like your image would benefit from some more photoshop technique so my initial tips (trusting I'm not telling you how to suck eggs) would be:
Learn how to use levels and curves using adjustment layers and masks. Adjustment layers give you a lot of flexibility to backtrack & tune adjustments. Masking is critical so that you can selectively blend areas of different layers.
There's nuance to masks as well - egs: feathering / blurring and or adjusting brightness & contrast of masks (via levels & curves) is important and being able to automatically generate masks for adjustment layers based on selections is quite powerful
Figure out how to to "real" unsharp masking (not the PS menu option). Just google and you'll find the recipe.
Figure out how to isolate stars from adjustments so you can avoid the washed out star syndrome.
Get some sharpening and noise reduction tools (a few $US) that have PS plugins.
Some of Noel Carboni's PS actions look quite useful too provided you use the results carefully (ie blending using layers & masks on top of your own processing effort). I've only started experimenting with them in the last couple of weeks. If nothing else, analysing the steps in some of his actions is a PS learning experience too.
Learn what the RGB histograms should look like for typical and well balanced nebula and galaxy images.
Preserve older versions of your image. Sometimes my processing yields versions that have different strengths and weaknesses. Being able to pick the best elements from each can be beneficial.
