First try and DSS

Hi all,

I must say this is the first time I have wondered into this area to actually post anything.

I was on vacation in central New Brunswick this past weekend and due to the dark skies they have I decided to give astrophotography a go.

Now the overall images I got weren't bad, but were nothing great. For the most part I used a Super Takumar 85mm 1.9 @ 2.0-2.8, at 6 seconds, 1600 ISO.

I'm starting to think I should have pushed my ISO higher, but I don't really know how all of this stuff works in relation to the stars.

Any info about people using similar equipment would be great for future reference.

The other questions I have are about DSS. I'm currently work on a Mac, but saw that DSS was the most highly recommended. I do have a windows partition on my laptop so I didn't hesitate to download DSS.

I ran a series of images through the DSS engine and they looked pretty decent, if not a little flat in colour, the issue now is that I saved them as a .tif file, moved them to the Mac side of the computer and they look horrible the detail is all gone and it looks like a compressed JPEG with banding.

Did I do something wrong or is this normal when transferring files this way? Any help would be great,

Johnsoir

i think 6 seconds isnt long enough for much of anything, 1600 ISO is too noisy for my taste,try 30 seconds and 800 ISO, then save it and see what it looks like, DSS has great help files and recommended settings as you go to help you out

30 sec is going to show trails at 85mm; 6 sec is probably all he can do with that lens and no tracking.

thats right, sometimes i forget and naturally assume a mount is being used