Hello from John in Wimbledon (+first image)

Hi John and first of all welcome to Roboscopes

f my first image had been 10% as good as yours, I would have been super happy, its not a bad image full stop. So in reality you are doing Ok to be fair.

Just keep imaging and processing and as you are doing now, asking questions and you will just keep improving


Ps you can insert the image on the forum rather than a link if you prefer

Steve

Steve,
Many thanks for the words of encouragement.
John

Hello John, 

Welcome to the hobby that can get you hooked and end up costing you a fortune.

That's a fantastic result you posted and one you might consider getting printed and hung up. That's what I would have done if during the first few years into the hobby I'd produced anything nearly as good as that. It's a big help having access to a great telescope and good data, however, as you've already found out even then there's a lot required to transform it into a great picture. 

I'd find it very difficult to point out much wrong with it. To do so I believe would require delving deep into how to deal with issues that arise from trying to extract as much as possible from images taken through our atmosphere and ever changing skies. You'll never stop learning new things. 

At this stage I'd suggest looking for some free data, such as that which is linked to on the Home page of this site. That's a narrowband image of part of the veil nebula but taken with a mono camera thus having more than one set of images, one set per filter. At this stage you may wish to spend more time using colour camera images. There are probably no calibration files either being it was captured when there was a different camera on the telescope on pier 7, so don't expect a flawless result. Feel free to ask questions if you do so and I'm sure you'll get a reply, just a bit of patience required.

Steve mentioned adding your image to a post but to do so first you'd need to greatly shrink a copy of the image to no more than 4mb, yes 4 megabytes. That's plenty for viewing on this forum and easier for us to see all of the image without scrolling. That might be due to the fact I'm on a tablet so might be ok viewed on a computer. 

This is a great place to get an introduction and if you become hooked maybe you'll look into acquiring your own setup at home. It can be a very expensive hobby and a great alternative which will give you so much more and better data is by joining one of the syndicates. Only do so if you're happy to spend great chunks of your life staring at a computer screen. The really compelling part of joining a syndicate is that you'll have a great variety of objects to process and you can take your time and leave the harder ones to process until another time. You'll gain a lot of experience and that data ain't going anywhere, so you can can revisit something later and have a go at improving it. You'll still have option afterwards to buy your own setup and be in a better position to decide upon what you would prefer to image, widefield or smaller objects. I've gone on for far too long already. 

Thanks for sharing your image. 

Cheers, 

Ray 

Ray,
Many thanks in deed for your encouragement and really good advice.
I think I may split my efforts and image with a colour sensor to try to get more of a hang of what''s needed for different objects, while taking your advice and getting stuck into the available data and trying some monochrome datasets.

Thanks so much again, really appreciate your advice.  I think I may be hooked!

With best wishes,
John