those pictures really show progress - the last one has much sharper focus than the others which makes a big difference. Same equipment throughout or have you been upgrading?
Celestron C8 scope throughout. 1st & 2nd images same camera - what happened in between those dates was the Gary Palmer Deep Sky Imaging workshop (6 hours and a 300 mile round trip). 3rd and 4th images 2 different cameras but these see the introduction of a Bahtinov mask and JMI Motorised focuser plus greater understanding of the use of the histogram and the interaction of exposure, gain and offset/black level/brightness.
I suppose I should revisit with the first camera and post back for comparison.
Orion-100x15s-g200-bl50.jpg (94.59 KiB) Viewed 13169 times
Not a bad return for an investment in 25 minutes of time (+ the 30 minutes of mount alignment, polar alignment, focusing, checking the histogram of a single frame in FITs Liberator).
Your images are improving at an exponential rate. Like you say, discipline and organization are the keys to success. "Art" is for those who leave things to chance.
Cheers Brian. Focus was with a Bahtinov Mask, the 60s frames were unguided, shot through intermittent thin cloud which resulted in 50% of the frames being rejected. Still a good return on 30 frames.
Traditional capture of RAW files with darks, flats and bias frames. Processed In SiriL and GIMP. Because of the cloud I did apply some noise reduction in GIMP.
This thread is more about the journey and to try to get over to beginners that my improvement is about mount alignment, polar alignment, focusing, checking the histogram of a single frame in FITs Liberator rather than equipment.
