2 quick and dirty widefields from suburban Wyoming

[iceman (Mike)]

Imaged Jupiter in terrible seeing from 1am-2am this morning, and as Scorpius was rising over the trees I thought it was a good chance to put the camera on the tripod on the EQ platform and do some widefield stuff.

Used the stock 18-55mm lens at 18mm, f/4.5, ISO 800.

Focused manually by taking some 4-6s exposures, zooming in on the LCD and trying again until it looked as sharp as I could get it.

Took 3 shots at 70, 90 and 120s, and the second is two shots @ 120s. My tracking was fairly accurate at 6 metres focal length on Jupiter, so at 18mm for widefield there's no sign of trailing at 2 minutes. Although because the lens is just average, there's some CA and distortions at the edge.

Both sets median stacked in registar, and then a minor curves adjustment in Photoshop. That's it. I'm sure I could clip the histogram to get the background darker, but i'll work on the processing later. My widefield processing leaves something to be desired.

Anyway comments welcome, if I was better at the processing i'm sure the nice milkyway lanes would come out.. if you squint you can see the dark lanes leading up to Antares in the second shot.. though of course nowhere near as good as Rocket Boy's, with a better camera, better lens, better dark site and better processing

Thanks for looking.

[davidpretorius]

quick and dirty not likeley, these are brilliant. The seeing due to a south westerly jetstream meant that i did n't even bother with the scope last night. I did get up and stand and look at this area of the sky for 5 minutes.

You have captured it beautifully. I am sure more processing can be done as you say, but I compare this to a single avi frame of jupiter that is better than some stacked images.

Great to see the eq mount working nicely for this.

Ok, when are you buying a ed80?? You can tell us, we won't tell that username icemanswife!

[Itchy]

Hi Mike

There is nothing wrong with these shots!

What makes these difficult to process is the trees in the foreground. So, I just cropped them out. I then did some levels adjustments and a little curve adjustment and then ran it through ABE to remove the gradient caused by the horizon. Here is the result!

[Rodstar (Rod)]

A nice collaborative effort, Mike & Itchy! I wonder what else you can do with that EQ mount, Mike? A slow moving disco ball, perhaps?

[Striker (Tony)]

Nice work Mike.

Nothing wrong with your images Mike...I kind of like those dark tree nebula's...lol

[RB (Andrew)]

Mate there's nothing wrong with those shots, I'd be very proud of them.
There's heaps of detail there and like Tony (itchy) shows you can bring out more.
Actually I like both versions, your's tends to put things in perspective with the trees in the foreground.

Well done Mike.
Another win at the SPSP for next year....

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks guys, and a nice result Itchy. I'll upload the full versions tomorrow and let you have a play with them.

Processing widefields is a skill I need to learn properly, since that's about all I can do with my gear apart from solar system imaging

So expect some questions in the next few days.. I'll even buy imagesplus or other software if it's going to give a better result. The extent of my knowledge is curves and levels in photoshop

Anyway thanks again, and mojo will be happy I finally used my 350D for some astro work