This is a rather opportunitistic shot, I wasn't intending to do any deep sky imaging last night... I set up and started imaging the moon during twilight, so I didn't bother polar aligning, just a rough alignment with a compass.
I played about with the moon for a while and just before packing up I thought I'd have another go at M42. I noticed it seemed to be tracking pretty well while imaging the moon... not much drift.
My first attempt at M42 weeks ago didn't work cause I didn't have my long exposure ToUcam connected correctly. My second attempt was a piggy back shot of Orion's Sword using a 50mm Zuiko lens on the ToUcam, but inexperience and dew conspired against me (as well as a dark frame problem in Registax?)
This image is 25 frames at 10 secs at prime focus of my C8 with f6.3 focal reducer (fl = 1280mm), unguided, with dark frame and wavelets. I used PS to clone out some artifacts around the outside of the image, but other than that I wasn't happy with any other colour / level / sharpening adjustments. ...ah and I accidently saved this one as BMP rather than a TIF which I normally use...
I'm still getting strange BRIGHT artifacts in my images when I process darkframes in Registax. Anyone have any clues? I only had a few in this image, but nearly all the dark areas of it's sister file (saved as a TIF one step earlier in the processing) are bright blues, etc. When I Take a dark frame I have tried taking the darkframe as both a separate avi and as a few frames on the end of the imaging run. I then stack the darkframe and save it as a BMP, then call it back into Registax when I stack the movie. Is there a better way?
Thanks,
Al.
