Mead DSI-Color - First Night Out

On Thursday 14th Feb I have received my Mead DSI-Color camera, luckily today that is Saturday the condition of sky was very good, so i planned for photography session.

Mead advertises DSI cameras are very easy to use, but on Windows VISTA there is lot of problems in using camera, I searched all forums and did not find any proper solution.

I spend Friday night and Saturday morning in installing uninstalling Autostar suite and other required software, at last camera started working...

The evening was chilling, temp was -4 -8 Celsius when i started at 7:00PM !

I setup my mount, did casual alignment, and DSI was ready for action. I first targeted brightest object available MOON, but with focal length of 400mm the results were not acceptable, Moon was not sharp enough :( the Magic Eye function of Autostar software did not help much !!!!

Then i turned scope to M42(my test object) and spend some 10min in focusing cam, i realized that the most critical part of any astrophotos is focus!!!

As soon as i got reasonable focus, i took dark frames(It is very important to take dark frames for Deep sky photos, DSI dose have some hot pixels that can't be eliminated without Dark Frames.

Once dark frames are completed i started takings snaps of nebula, I started with 5sec and pushed till 2mins. unfortunately my 1 min and 2mins snaps were not saved due to software problem or may be due to my poor understanding of camera !!!

i got some so so pics with exposure of 5x8, 10x7, 30x5 sec exposures...

I processed those and combined in photoshop, the result is not satisfactory but if i would not have those lost images with exposure of 1 min and 2 min (taken for Luminance) then it would have been excellent image :)

Uff... Astrophotography is cruel, lessons are always learnt hard way !!!

during this session i also notice the LXD 75 mount works great even though the scope aligned causally it tracked objects very well, even 2min exposures were excellent with no trails or jumping in star image... Cool thing [:)]

here is photo of M2 taken with DSI. The result is not great but it is my first attempt with using Meade DSI, and image is not bad; considering heavy lightg pollution of New York...[:)]




Hope very soon i get clear sky !!!
Cheers
Sameer

AstroTech 66 ED in Action

After wait of almost 20days, at last i got clear sky on 10th Feb. The sky condition was very good but temperature was chilling -15 Celsius !!!

I setup mount and scope and attached My Camera at prime focus. Now my scope is working as 400mm Tele lens...

I roughly aligned mount using polar finder and centered Moon, focused and bingo !!!

Got few nice images of moon....


using Moon as focusing aid, i turned scope to My Favorite M42...
I took series of photos from 5sec to 30sec at 100 ISO and 800 ISO. photos taken at ISO 100 was almost useless due to heavy light pollution, and at 800 ISO sky background turned red !!!

Also the images are soft-focused as focus shifted while adjusting telescope :(

I combined and processed images taken at 800 ISO and achived acceptable image of M42.

here is the result processed and cropped...



Following are the unprocessed crops from original images which are combined in above processed image..



Now weather here for next 15 days is expected to be bad :( and wait for clear night started again...

Cheers
Sameer