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Canon 300D/C-8: things I'm learning.
Greets, my brothers!
The rain has ended for awhile here in Mill Valley, CA. It was followed by two nights of heavy fog, but now that's clearing up. Night before last, I set up my C-8 on a CG5 mount and plugged in the 300D. I had done a rough polar alignment, but the first photo of M42 showed elongated stars (30 sec exposure @ ISO 800). Since I have the cam hooked up to a laptop via the USB connector, I tried making a small adjustment to azimuth at the base of the mount, and snapped another picture. Stars looked worse. I tried adjusting in the opposite direction and snapped another pic. Stars got better! So in five minutes, I was able to adjust both alt and az enough to get those pesky stars into nice, tight little balls. My experience with drift alignment is that it takes me 3-10 times longer if I really want to get it right. If you don't have a laptop, you can zoom into each pic you've snapped and see what the stars are doing. The laptop and bundled software is really a big help in speeding up the process, though, as you don't have to use the shutter delay to avoid shaking the scope when you snap off a pic. With M42 as a target, there are enough bright stars that one can focus reasonably well peeking through the viewfinder. I took exposures at a variety of ISO settings, and found 800 was working best for this scope/time exposure setting. 1600 was too noisy, but still not bad. So now like every other wire-head with a camera, I present to you my obligatory "first image of M24", the most photographed deep sky object. http://www.bogusnet.net/gallery/Deep-Sky-Objects/m42v1 The stars aren't perfect, but it's OK for a first time out, imho. I hope to add a remote shutter release soon, so I can work on some minute-plus exposures. Ultimately, I hope to have my 18" dob tracking, but that will have to wait until summer. Clear Skies, Uncle Bob |
#2
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Very nice, you can download a free copy of Neat Image which will do a good
job of reducing noise/graininess in your image (last step of image processing ...) "Uncle Bob" wrote in message ng.com... Greets, my brothers! The rain has ended for awhile here in Mill Valley, CA. It was followed by two nights of heavy fog, but now that's clearing up. Night before last, I set up my C-8 on a CG5 mount and plugged in the 300D. I had done a rough polar alignment, but the first photo of M42 showed elongated stars (30 sec exposure @ ISO 800). Since I have the cam hooked up to a laptop via the USB connector, I tried making a small adjustment to azimuth at the base of the mount, and snapped another picture. Stars looked worse. I tried adjusting in the opposite direction and snapped another pic. Stars got better! So in five minutes, I was able to adjust both alt and az enough to get those pesky stars into nice, tight little balls. My experience with drift alignment is that it takes me 3-10 times longer if I really want to get it right. If you don't have a laptop, you can zoom into each pic you've snapped and see what the stars are doing. The laptop and bundled software is really a big help in speeding up the process, though, as you don't have to use the shutter delay to avoid shaking the scope when you snap off a pic. With M42 as a target, there are enough bright stars that one can focus reasonably well peeking through the viewfinder. I took exposures at a variety of ISO settings, and found 800 was working best for this scope/time exposure setting. 1600 was too noisy, but still not bad. So now like every other wire-head with a camera, I present to you my obligatory "first image of M24", the most photographed deep sky object. http://www.bogusnet.net/gallery/Deep-Sky-Objects/m42v1 The stars aren't perfect, but it's OK for a first time out, imho. I hope to add a remote shutter release soon, so I can work on some minute-plus exposures. Ultimately, I hope to have my 18" dob tracking, but that will have to wait until summer. Clear Skies, Uncle Bob |
#3
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Chuck wrote:
Very nice, you can download a free copy of Neat Image which will do a good job of reducing noise/graininess in your image (last step of image processing ...) Thanks for the tip--I'll check it out. Uncle Bob |
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