The Circus is back in town

Seanie,
those widefield image of orion nebula were with the 300D, I only once gave the toucam a serious go with the etx on this object, but it really was too faint for it.

Nice one Dave!!

Good photo Dave
I've seen some photos of M42 which how nice small round stars in the trapezium yet show lots of detail in the cloud. I presume this can only be done with two exposures, one long and one short, that are in some way combined. How would one try something like that??

Michael - the problem with taking two images of different exposure length is that when you combine them and do your processing trickery, you can start getting unwanted effects, like halos, which are difficult to get rid of.

The technique would probably use masking fairly extensively when combining the images but its something I've never tried. I'd rather concentrate on getting the imaging right for now and then maybe start tuning up my processing techniques later.

Its probably easier to take the kind of image you are talking about by doing wide-field imaging.

One thing I did do with image above was to mask the bright stars then crank up the levels of the surrounding nebulosity but all I got was halos, even at very minor adjustments to the 'background'...

Perhaps Dave Power or others here might have some tips?


Dave L - webcams would probably not record the dim detail because they don't have the sensitivity. But the DSI attached to the ETX would do a reasonable job - we'll see

Cheers

Dave

Seanie,
those widefield image of orion nebula were with the 300D, I only once gave the toucam a serious go with the etx on this object, but it really was too faint for it.

I know the image you talk of, and I didn't know it was with the 300D!!

webcams would probably not record the dim detail because they don't have the sensitivity. But the DSI attached to the ETX would do a reasonable job - we'll see
Dave

Of course, but I thought I'd give it a go just to see what would come out, all I got was the trapezium and some fainy fuzzyness around it.
I expect the DSI to do good things with the etx.