First Try at M45

Well yesterday we got the Collimation laser and collimated the telescope and also I found amongst my dads telescope gear a low profile adapter. So last night decided to go out and get a few pictures of M45. I was using my Canon 1D Mark3 which I don't have a remote for so I could only do 30sec subs. I have a Canon 300D Rebel with a remote but I think it would produce a lot of noise, to much for my liking. But I might try it tomorrow morning on Orion.

Just had enough time to get 18 subs in.

lights:
9x30sec. at ISO 800
Darks:
9x30sec. at ISO 800

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Looks like you clipped out all the nebulosity, but it's still a nice picture.

I can see nebulosity. Nice shot - what telescope were you using?

I used a Celestron SP-C6 telescope with my Canon 1D Mark3. Like I said I don't have a remote for it so I could only do 30sec. subs. But I did just find a remote on Amazon, it looks like a nice one and cheap price. You can set it up to take so many shots at intervals of a few sec. or minutes. I'll order that today, probably get it in the mail next week.

This is a very nice image. The black point is not clipped, the lack of visible nebulosity is due to lack of exposure time. This is what I would expect from 4.5 minutes of exposure stacked from 30 second sub exposures. 30 seconds is a very modest exposure time, especially on an object with so much faint detail at the low end of the histogram. Stacking works to increase signal while decreasing noise but it can't create data that's not present in the sub exposures, which is why extending the exposure length is critical to the stacked file.

As I said, this is a very nice image and certainly something solid to build on.

devildog2222 wrote in post #11103764
I used a Celestron SP-C6 telescope with my Canon 1D Mark3. Like I said I don't have a remote for it so I could only do 30sec. subs. But I did just find a remote on Amazon, it looks like a nice one and cheap price. You can set it up to take so many shots at intervals of a few sec. or minutes. I'll order that today, probably get it in the mail next week.

If you're not shooting from a remote location, or have a notebook or laptop PC you can always use the USB interface and the EOS Utility software to shoot bulb exposures as long and as many as you like.