First real attempt at Deep sky imaging

Nice pic of m82. You need more signal to get rid of lp background safe in processing – I will say 50 frames will do. As for m81 the arms are so faint – I had to stack some 120 frames to get an idea – well if you have less light pollution you might get away with less then that. Anyway, you need equatorial mount to be able to get longer exposures to – else it’s a titanic effort to take that many shots and rotate them manually and then process them one by one – believe me…

As for RCOS scopes – well in one year or so, after I got everything out of my lx90, I will be looking at a better scope. And quality rather then size catches my interest lately – small and powerful

Larry

Thanks lads,
I just couldn't take more shots of M82, it was 2 in the morning and I was shattered, maybe next time.
What kind is the 14" scope on mount Wilson,

LArry,
What kind of aperture would you be looking for in a RCOS system, the smallest I saw on
www.rcopticalsystems.com/
was a 10 inch, and the price was $12100, and that doesnt even include a mount !!!
And you'd need a very serious mount for something like that.
But it has to be said that the only thing that could beat it optically would be a 10inch Tak refractor.

If you find somewhere with "cheap" RCOS optics, let us know..

Two more super images Dave! Well done!
I'm partcularly impressed with the one of M82.
Excellent!

Michael

Thanks Michael,
I just wish I'd taken more shots of it for stacking purposes, it didnt look anything worth saving on the camera screen, so I stopped and went back into the house.
I'm still surprised with the colour.
Heres a cropped version with better contrast, even more detail is visible (there's nothing better to do given the present lousy weather except re-process previous pics).
You can just see that the tracking errors are starting to show also.


www.irishastronomy.org/user_resources/fi...42368-m82_9small.jpg

Nice work Dave!
I never realised Registax could be used for deep sky images. I always iassumed it was only of use for planetary images and would be inappropriate for dso use. Well, looks like I've been proved wrong!

With all the bad weather, I've been itching for some time to get out and do some imaging again. To help cure my cravings, I decided to try and use Registax to process 19 no. 30 sec images I took of M57 last May.
The result was very surprising. It seemed to stack and align the images much better than I could do in Photoshop. The result is below:


If you compare the above version to the original one I aligned and stacked in Photoshop (see below), I think it's fair to say there's a big difference.

A very nice shot Michael! Yes, registax I used as well to align/stack images. I only used Photoshop to rotate them since I have better control there. Also in registax I think using manual align for dso is best since in most of the cases signal is to weak to get a good auto-alignment.

Larry