I may have reached the limitations of my set up (10"
I posted recently in the beginners forum about many short exposures vs fewer long ones and I think I understand now.
Saturday night was exceptional for me! Pretty good skies and very nice tracking! I couldn't get myself to stop! Clouds rolled in at midnight forcing me to call it quits...
I managed 200 20 sec exposures of
After that session finished my target was nearing the
After that M45 just crested my trees and while I am aware my focal length is too long I still gave it a try. I was able to manage 30 exposures before the clouds ended my session.
I processed all of it (rather quickly) yesterday and I found the images to be quite noisy. I used master darks and master bias frames in the stacks.
I followed Bladekeeper's workflow in
I found M45 requires less processing. I'm not sure if that was due to the brightness of the object or the much fewer subs.
Attached are the images. I will add links to the stacked images if anyone would care to give them a try. I'm curious as to whether the noise can be reduced with better processing.
Here are the links.
Deer Lick group https://www.dropbox.com/s/3f7x1kugh3f2o ... k.fts?dl=0
M74 https://www.dropbox.com/s/ljmosvhw94rt25q/M74.fts?dl=0
M45 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3l3okhjsk4ygfao/M45.fts?dl=0
Thanks!
Larry