Anthony's Astrophotography

Hi Everyone,

Once again I have had an opportunity to frequent my favourite dark sky location out at Blackbutt in South East Queensland. Seeing wasn’t the best but I have imaged on worse nights. All in all I think it was about a 7.5 out of 10. During this trip we had a new comer to the site, Rob. He is very much getting into Astrophotography but rapidly ramping up his skills and equipment, he too managed to get a nice shot of M33.

Now that I have the EQ8 Mount I have decided to take a different approach to my image capturing processes and the Library of images I am keeping. I want to try and measure the difference the new mount has made to the overall quality of my images.

I have also decided I will be targeting one object per evening and following this target for as long as the night allows. The aim here is to capture the highest quality images that I can given the limited time I get under the stars each month. Ultimately I would like to capture and process images good enough to print and put in a book or hang on the wall.

Starting with these new directions, for November I imaged NGC 253 for the entire evening of the 2^nd / 3^rd of November for a total of:

• 17 * 10 minute subs (~2.8 Hours in total) @ ISO 800.
• 13 * 10 Minute Dark frames (there was 20 but I seem to get light leak into the scope during daylight hours so 7 were scrapped).
• 20 * Bias Frames
• 20 * Flat Frames

The equipment used was:

• EQ8 Mount
• GSO RC8 Telescope
• Baader UV/IR Filter
• Central DS 600D Camera (With Backyard EOS)
• Guiding with a William Optics ZenithStar 70mm APO and
• LodeStar Guider Camera.

This time I also decided to try out PHD2 Guiding (Can be found here), I find this has a few little extra’s that make understanding guiding and tuning EQMod settings just that bit easier. For those that have used PHD by Craig Stark will find this to be a natural progression and easy to use as it is founded on the original PHD.

Anyway here is the processed image, I am hoping next time to record the steps taken when processing so I can comment on this also and compare efforts. I hope you like this one.

Cheers

Anthony