M8 - Still a long way to go

[midnight (Darrin)]

Greetings all again.

Well I decided to take a brief break from Jupiter and try some deeper space with my series 5000 refractor which I picked up pretty cheap as it was a "run out" model.

My first image a while ago was frightening in that it had huge field curvature. So it was recommended to get a "field flattner" so onto the phone for 1 and it made a huge difference.

So with that sorted out, I targetted M8 with the 40D and here it is. There appears to be obvious focussing issue so a Bahtinov mask is next on the list. I think my polar alignment is also not particularly good cause there is a noticeable rotation from the 1st frame to the 8th photo.

If my polar alignment is out a little, will this affect stacking in DSS? This image is 8x5 minutes and I gave the darks a go too and this has made a huge difference. 10x darks. Anyway, it's average but I'm enjoying the learning curve!!

First photo is the stack and some Photoshop using the tutorial from atalas which is also in this forum. The second is single frame showing how much noise there is. Stacking and darks makes a difference!! Both cropped to keep the file size down for posting.

Thanks for looking. Comments/help/tips would be much appreciated.

[multiweb (Marc)]

I think it looks very good. The FF is doing its job, the field's beautiful. You also got good colors going. Focus maybe a bit soft but not out by much and that's easily fixed with a bathinov mask or other focusing aids. Nice work. Keep'em coming.

[midnight (Darrin)]

Thanks Marc! I like a lot of your work and the effort you put into your images. I also liked a lot of Octane's images for similar reasons but also because of what he was able to demonstrate out of the canon 40D.

I suppose my gripe is the obvious (but small) star trailing which is not making things pinpoint and if I want to image over say 1hr, I wasn't sure if DSS actually tries to "de-rotate" the images. Each 5 min frame looks ok but over 1hr it shows.

Anyway, thanks for your kind words and support. I am actually finding the colour not to be a problem to extract (dark skies maybe) and I found out the "fade" tool in Photoshop via the tutorial which seems to do a nice job.

You should see one of my first images though this scope without the flattener and it reminded me of the Millenium Falcon going into warp

Cheers and you keep up the good work too Marc!

Darrin...

[that_guy (Tony)]

was this guided?