What's wrong with this pic?

and why does a polar scope not give as good allignment as drift method...( or does it??)

From what i have read....................the drift method is fine for casual observing. If its astrophotography you want to do................then you MUST polar align your scope 100% ACCURATELY.

Polar alignment is so easy a monkey could do it (yep even i learned how to do it). It simply means aligning the polar axis of your scope mount with the north pole (northern star Polaris). Then watch which direction objects drift out of view and adjust manually the back end of the mount to either east or west until there is very little drift visible.

Drifting in astro photos = blur. Cancel out the drift and you cancel out the blur.

T
Is registax any use for deep sky???

Cheers

yes, but it takes a hefty PC to run it with alot of big images.

Hi Maygrey,

I use Registax for the Planetary and Lunar imaging, I have tried it with some of the deep sky stuff however, it wasnt up to the task on my PC anyway, (2 x 2.5 GHz processor, 2GB RAM), which was probably down to the size of each of the exposures when converted to Tiffs (about 45MBytes per image). However, REgistax is the biz on processing the planetary AVI files alright.

As a result, I too use Deep Sky Stacker for the Deep Sky stuff that I capture with my Canon 350D. The good thing is that it can import the RAW files without any convertions to other file formats, which saves alot of time.

The trick with DSS is to tell it to Stack your best images (those with a score greater than half, of the best image) and then play around with the Luminosity, Saturation and related settings after it stacks the images for you.

Hi Kevin.
Happy Christmas to you too.

It's great to see you asking the questions.
We can all learn a little form this kind of post.

I tried the same shot a year ago and got
this image from one shot through the ETX-125 with
a Canon 350 set at 1600 ISO for 20 sec.

(It's the only true 'deep sky' shot I've ever taken)
www.frankryanjr.com/m42.jpg

and if you compare them your image shows a whole lot more
nebulosity. Just get the tracking issue sorted and you'll be golden.

As far as stacking.
I tried deepsky stacker myself and found it very easy to use.
Like Dave said it needs a high spec PC to run on though.

Let us know how you get on next try.

HI ALL... THANKS FOR REPLIES.

To pj...

From what i have read....................the drift method is fine for casual observing. If its astrophotography you want to do................then you MUST polar align your scope 100% ACCURATELY.

Thanks for post but I understood that the drift method is one of the most accurate methods... just very laborious!!!! Anyone any comment???

To frank... checked out your attempt... suppose mine not too bad if i got trackin sorted.... makes me feel ok if i can come even close to some of your work!!!! you have some crackers!!!

be cool all!!

Thanks for post but I understood that the drift method is one of the most accurate methods.

It is for casual viewing. As i said above for taking pics................. polar alignment is essential.