I decided to try taking shots of the Horsehead and Flame nebula with my telescope setup though i wasn't able to get a lot of shots due to the weather effects on my camera and scope. However what i got wasn't half bad for only 6 shots. My equipment is as follows: Meade LX-90 OTA (Classic) Orion Sirius EQ-G computerized tripod with PC control connection Meade f/6.3 FF/FR that is apparently actually F/4.5 or so (one of the mis-manufactured Meade ones) Orion Nautilus 2" filter wheel 2" Dark Frame Filter. 2" Orion SkyGLow filter Canon EOS 60D (modified for Full Spectrum) Orion SSAG and a 50mm Guide scope package from Orion /w IR block filter MaximDL 6.2 controlling telescope, camera, filter wheel and SSAG All Subs were 00:04:10 long at ISO 800 in moderately light polluted skies with temps hovering around 14-18 C Subs Were dark and flat subtracted Processing was done in MaximDL, mostly, with a few sharpening and noise reduction effects in Photoshop.
Nicely done Brian. I'm always amazed what people like you can do with a modest and noisy DSLR with a bit of hard work. You might want to play with MaxIm's sharpening and noise reduction capabilities too - there is a lot there. It's not quite as interactive as Photoshop, but a lot there.
Not bad Brian. It looks like there is a green gradient. You might want to try HLVG at the link below. It is great for removing green gradients. http://www.deepskycolors.com/archive/2010/04/26/hasta-La-Vista-Green.html
Yeah that gradient was because the flat i took wasn't as completely flat as i hoped. I took the images on friday, left my scope setup all day saturday and then took the flats and some darks saturday night when the temp was similar. Unfortunately the cold weather caused my scope to shrink enough to throw the colimation way off. Everything on the outer edge of the image was distorted completely and no amount of focus fixed it when i first tried to take some lights of M33. I took the flats anyway since the orientation of the camera to scope hadnt changed but it left the image with a bit if a gradient to it that i could not get rid of. I did crop the image a bit to remove the worst of it but that still left some glow on the right side. Next time i will take the flats at the same time as the images...
I should also mention the focal reducer/flattener i use is one if the meade f/6.3’s that is really f/4.5. When it shrunk it also affected the focal ratio by making it worse. Usually the outer edges only have slightly elongated stars but this time they were bad, WAY out of focus.
