Some of you here, I know, will be familiar with the name of
Steve Richards of the Chanctonbury Observatory, who uses various usernames on some of the most popular UK astronomy forums.
Like many other amateurs, I was delighted to hear that he had been writing a book on successful deep sky imaging, which was published a couple of months or so ago. As my processing skills are sadly lacking, I quickly ordered a copy!
Having missed out on last weekend's clear sky due to a stomach upset, I decided to try a relatively undemanding target on Tuesday night (26th), as I have not imaged anything at all since buying the book.
Anyway, here is my initial attempt at processing.
The image is a combination of 35, 180 secs each light frames - 20 darks and 10 flats, taken with a 70-300mm zoom lens set at about 220mm and fitted with a Kenko 'Ha' filter. My modded 350D was mounted on my AstroTrac as usual. The subs were stacked in DSS and as the whole image appeared red, the result was converted to B&W in PS.
As I get more experienced with digital imaging, hopefully things will improve but I'm quite happy with this initial result - especially as the lens used was a cheap Miranda from ebay!
Tonight cloud stopped play while taking a shot of NGC281 (Pacman) - but I shall have a bash at processing it after a few hours 'shut-eye'.
