thought i'd give a bit of deep space a crack on the 12" sw goto. taken last night, was a bit of a challenge, sunset 5.30pmish and near full moon rise 6.58pm.
canon 600d eos, 8 @ 4secs shots stacked in DSS, no darks etc iso 6400.
my first attempt at anything deep space. not a bad effort and getting used to DSS was interesting. can definitely see the benefit in stacking now, so will take more than 1o next time for sure ... plenty of noise.
edited in photoshop.
i tried the triffid also, but it didn't really result in too much with cloud rolling in.
will definitely try and stretch out the exposure times as far as possible and maybe lower the iso. i didn't know if the dob was going to be able to produce anything worthwhile on deep sky objects, definitely worth sticking at it and seeing what it's capable of. besides its nice to image more than just the planets. quite a few extra targets around!
ok, i was super keen to do better ...
in melbourne between tonights clouds, i came up with this version of the lagoon. 2nd attempt, sw goto dob 12", DSS 16 shots stacked 10 darks, iso 6400 @ 10 seconds.
i also got an omega centauri shot, zooming in on that it looks like stars are starting to trail at 10 secs - but i haven't processed yet.
nice to get some more detail in the nebula although i think i've over cooked the red a bit.
yep, thanks Ken and Richard, looking forward to getting into it and the dob will satisfy me with pics like that for a while yet .. an equatorial mount is still a way off for me ..
i put up a pinker version on flickr which looks a lot nicer than the red version.