Zer0_F0x

Thanks! I have to drive for an hour to get to a bortle 4 to shoot most targets I have in mind, about a week every month with no moon, one night only on any given week due to work schedule and the weather has to be good as well... Which I'm sure is a struggle everyone in here is familiar with :p

This target in particular will be unavailable in the summer months when the weather is always nice, so I'll try to give it another go in a few days and see what happens.

I'll post a side by side comparison to hopefully highlight some improvement!

I could probably get away with a bit more saturation on the colors, it's already pretty noisy so I might as well

And the lord spoke to them and said "make it illegal to deny me"

Set it to whatever value feels more neutral to you, just keep it locked in.

The colors look amazing, well done!

I've had the same issue with those red streaks. I've seen a massive reduction to them by using a lens heating strip to eliminate dew sitting on the lens.

Also make sure your white balance isn't set to auto.

You can somewhat get rid of them in photoshop:

Select by brightness, select something very bright to get all the nebula and stars selected, then select inverse to select only dark sky, feather a few pixels and then go to color adjustment and darken the red channel a bit until the streaks aren't visible or generally better.

Hope it helps!

Because the elected racist, apartheid loving fuck gave him the power. Money buys politicians, politicians make the rich even more so.

It's a big party and we're not invited

And yet if elections were to be held today the people responsible for this would easily hold office.

In fact, the minister responsible for this resigned at the time, then ran at the elections a few weeks later and was elected again by the people of the city with the most dead kids in this accident.

I'm using a stock Sony a6000. Light, cheap, decent low light performance. I'll probably dip my toes into modifying some cheap dslr for astro before moving on to a dedicated astronomy camera in the future.

The lens is the newish TTArtisan 500mm f6.3. It costs less than pretty much anything with that kind of reach and is decent enough, though I see myself selling it in the future and getting a triplet refractor and a 6" newtonian astrograph.

Someone's about to apply The Formula. ABC= X

Yes, this is on a StarAdventurer tracker, but 500mm is pretty much the limit for it.

The autoguider is basically a small scope with a small camera connected to a computer which runs the software you mentioned and uses the data from the secondary scope to correct the movement of the main scope in real time.

A go-to mount is definitely my next big upgrade as well.

Clear skies!

Thank you so much! I'll definitely be looking into dew heaters in the future!

Additional stacking definitely improves how bright faint objects appear, but it has gradually diminishing returns. In my limited experience you're right though.

Longer single frame exposure are definitely better, as long as the overall integration time remains the same.

The problem is my setup is at its limit with a 500mm lens on an APS-C sensor, going above 30 seconds without autoguiding would be incredibly hard!

I also have a 200mm lens that I got up to 120 sec exposures without trailing, but it's definitely a challenge.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you! I'm currently trying to get decent shots of the easier targets before moving on to harder ones