Excellent attempt! I do note that a lot of the stars in the lower half of the image have a faint companion just below them, so something is not aligning during the stacking process. Still, the detail in M31 is amazing.
I've been getting more into astrophotography, as well, but with an old Nikon D200/105mm/f2.5 piggybacked on my Celestron 5. This is my first attempt: http://earth.delith.com/M44.htm I am using Keith's Image Stacker for the Mac, but am having a lot of trouble getting it to accurately align the images when stacking. On Tue, 15 Oct 2013 18:00:44 -0500, Darren Addy wrote: > Y'all may recall > (hey, that rhymes!) > the m31 (Andromeda galaxy) image I shared a few days ago. It was a > single 45 second exposure and made from a single in-camera JPEG (not > even the RAW file). > Refresher link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/10181475554/ > > Well, I finally got to attempt my first use of the freeware > DeepSkyStacker (version 3.3.3 beta 51) and with it I stacked the 11 > "good" RAW images that I had taken that evening. Added together, they > represent a 6 minute "integrated" exposure time. > > The latest versions of DSS also let you work with the histogram (in R, > G, & B), luminance, and saturation, along with the curves. I then > applied a few Photoshop astrophotography-related actions and adjusted > the color-balance, which seemed a bit green to my eye. Here is the > result: > > http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelsmithy/10299785464/ > > This is still not even doing everything "right" because I was working > with no "dark frames", "bias frames", or "flats" which would make for > an even better stacked image (especially where noise is concerned). > Still I'm pretty pleased with the result, for my "maiden DSS voyage". --- Steven Sharpe - The Office Gallery [email protected] -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
