my first M42 orion

I have been slowly acquiring gear to do astrophotography, much of it is in the mail still, but the other day I realized that I could mount my camera to my CG5 mount using a macro focus rail, which turned out to be a very sturdy and accurate setup.
Mount - Celestron CG5-GT
Camera - Canon T3i unmodded
Lens - Sigma 70-300mm APO
Aperture - F/5.6
ISO - 400
Exposures - 7x 1 minute 10 seconds, un-guided
Darks - 7x 1 minute 10 seconds
Flats - None. I really wish I had taken some, I had no idea I would have vignette problems with a camera lens!
Total Exposure - 7 minutes 10 seconds
Stacked with DSS processed in CS6 as 32 bit tiff
I am looking forwards to this week because my auto guider package, field flattener, and t-thread arrive so I can put my new refractor to use!

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/70374000@N08/8​447107038/

Congratulations. It's a milestone.

Way to go.
Very nice.

thanks everyone. Does a short higher iso exposure pull in more data than a long low iso exposure? I was shooting iso 1600 for 25 seconds, and the image would be completely blown at 35 seconds so I cut my iso down and then decided I didnt want alot of noise so I pushed my exposure lengths and settled at iso 400.

That's a very good start however your at the very edge of clipping your BP . You may want to re work the original stacked image and be careful to watch your Histogram and not clip that BP. Also with a rework you can bring out the running man neb much better and adjust the colors better . Always keep in mind that just because the sky looks black doesn't mean the final image is suppose to be so dark you can't see small detail . You want to bring out as much detail as possible without being too dark .

Very nice.

Celestron wrote in post #15575016
That's a very good start however your at the very edge of clipping your BP . You may want to re work the original stacked image and be careful to watch your Histogram and not clip that BP. Also with a rework you can bring out the running man neb much better and adjust the colors better . Always keep in mind that just because the sky looks black doesn't mean the final image is suppose to be so dark you can't see small detail . You want to bring out as much detail as possible without being too dark .

Celestron can you advise any tutorials for editing astro images? I must admit that I used a light pollution removal technique which blackened the image alot, however quite effectively removed the light pollution. It involved duplicating the image into a layer, gaussian blur at 50% then inverting the image, turning down opacity of the inverted and blurred layer until I could see nebulosity of m42 in the original bottom layer and then I merged the two and turned up the blacks in a levels layer. I would like to start out by going in the right direction so I do not develop bad image editing habits so any info is appreciated. also does anyone know why the stars are elongated in the top right? Would flats help this at all? I have a theory that it is lens creep, sigma lenses are notorious for this but then again i suppose it could be barrel distortion? Not sure but next time I am going to use a heavy rubber band to make sure the lens stays permanently at 300mm.

calypsob wrote in post #15577923
Celestron can you advise any tutorials for editing astro images? I must admit that I used a light pollution removal technique which blackened the image alot, however quite effectively removed the light pollution. It involved duplicating the image into a layer, gaussian blur at 50% then inverting the image, turning down opacity of the inverted and blurred layer until I could see nebulosity of m42 in the original bottom layer and then I merged the two and turned up the blacks in a levels layer. I would like to start out by going in the right direction so I do not develop bad image editing habits so any info is appreciated. also does anyone know why the stars are elongated in the top right? Would flats help this at all? I have a theory that it is lens creep, sigma lenses are notorious for this but then again i suppose it could be barrel distortion? Not sure but next time I am going to use a heavy rubber band to make sure the lens stays permanently at 300mm.

What programs are you using to edit with now ? The technique you mentioned sounds some what like Jerry Lodriguss way of editing :

http://www.astropix.co​m/HTML/J_DIGIT/TOC_DIG​.HTM

Celestron wrote in post #15575016
That's a very good start however your at the very edge of clipping your BP . You may want to re work the original stacked image and be careful to watch your Histogram and not clip that BP. Also with a rework you can bring out the running man neb much better and adjust the colors better . Always keep in mind that just because the sky looks black doesn't mean the final image is suppose to be so dark you can't see small detail . You want to bring out as much detail as possible without being too dark .

Celestron wrote in post #15580306
What programs are you using to edit with now ? The technique you mentioned sounds some what like Jerry Lodriguss way of editing :

http://www.astropix.co​m/HTML/J_DIGIT/TOC_DIG​.HTM

I'm using DSS and CS6 I realized that the pill stars at the top right are coma and I can stop down to correct this. My light pollution technique came from here http://galacticfool.co​m …ight-pollution-photoshop/ I find DSS good for stacking but quite primitive for adjusting rgb, luminance, and saturation levels. I bounced my image from DSS as a 32bit tiff rational and editied that in CS6. I then flattened to 16bit and did the light pollution removal. I have not tried editing a fits file yet but I understand that nasa or some astronomy organization offeres a fits editor plugin for photoshop for free and I would like to try that. for now it is difficult to understand what the best methods are for processing so hopefully I can get pointed in the right direction. Jerry lodrigus seems to have some great techniques.

Off to a great start Wes! Looks great.

Cheers,
Stephen

its exquisite. very delicate. makes me want to do some imaging.

Very nice! I use to shoot my XTi in conjunction with my Celestron CPC800. Sold both and wished I had not!

I'm as green as it gets in this part of the forum, but that looks like one beautiful image to me. Congrats!