I finally got the last part that I have been waiting for to be able to hook my DSLR right to my telescope. I went out last night even with the moon washing out most of the sky to try things out. Here is what I got.

First question is what are all those red and blue speck in the background?

Next, the picture of saturn, is that out of focus that bad or over exposed?

This is what my scope is.

When trying to take photo's of objects almost over head you can't get your head in to see to focus, Is there something out there that will allow you to look in to focus? I know there is this.

But im not sure it will allow you to focus the camera while looking in the guider eye peice.

My last 3 questions are these, What is that red glow in the top corner? What do you use for image processing, and what is so special about that Cannon 350D (i think thats the one eveyone talks about).

Edit

Two pictures to compair. This is the first unedited photo. 

This is a stack or 3 or 4 of the same photo.

Its much much worse in the maxim software but photobucket doesn't allow that format to be uploaded. It like FIT format.

 Thanks a ton to the help.

Saturn is over-exposed.  Typically planets with a DSLR at prime focus are very difficult. That is a common result when people first try it.  Even if you get the exposure right, which is faster than you might expect, it is too small to work with.  Using a DSLR you want to use lots of focal length to achieve more magnification.  A 4x powermate would work great for that but still be somewhat small with the magnification equivalent you get with a DSLR. Think of a DSLR like using about a 43mm EP.  I prefer to save those objects for the web cam..  

The Globular looks like it is a little soft on focus otherwise not too bad. The moon looks pretty good also.  Some of the others look a little noisy. I don't know what ISO you're using but try turning it down. 

When focusing a DSLR for DSO's first find a small star to focus on. It doesn't have to be right over your head where it is hard to contort yourself to see through the camera. Once you have the star focused you can lock it down and not worry about it again.  However, taking pictures of the moon and planets you will have to refocus for each of them.  Often linking the camera to a laptop and taking a few test shots is what I do to help gain good focus.

It also looks like your tracking and/or polar alignment are off a bit. Using a Fork mount and getting a perfect polar alignment is not going to be possible like it is with an EQ mount. Getting a EQ wedge will be a great help, however with long exposures you might notice some field rotation still.

When processing images you want to process them in either RAW, TIFF or FITS.  Once you have completed processing and are ready to upload it to photobucket save it as a JPG file. 

The red glow can be one of two things. First would be intrusive stray light from a neighboring porch light or street light. The pic of Saturn looks as though that is the streak of light emitting from the bottom right.  Most likely cause of the redness in the corner is often that that is the side of the power source for the camera, your battery or battery adapter is located there putting off heat. The heat generated from that creates heat noise which is indicated by the redness in the corner nearest the power source.
Allowing time between exposures will help reduce this giving it time to cool back down a bit before the next shot. What I try to do for longer exposures is to center the object of center away from that corner. Then I can crop it out of the image.

Your last image which is a stack of images looks over-exposed on the cluster, and like you were using a high ISO during a long exposure thus creating too much noise in the image. It could also be caused by over processing it.  You also might want to learn to take Dark Frames, flat frames and flat bias frames. This will help with noise issues among other things such as vignetting.

All we can do is keep practicing, weather permitting, try try try and try over and over. Eventually we can get a nice image. but we can't expect all of them to turn out as we would like.   

This is only my opinion and some of what I can see. Perhaps someone with more experience can see more and will have more suggestions.

Have A Nice _____________

Well your not off to much on a couple thing. The red glow in the corner is noise and its caused by heat build up in the CCD chip during long exposures. The streak of light in the saturn picture is from the moon.

I do have another telescope here on a EQ mount, its a celestron C8. Problem is its broken at the moment. I think its either where you plug in the power or the power switch. I got the CPC 11 because the EQ one was such a pain in the butt to align. Its a go-to scope but not a skyalign one so you need to go to the stars that it tells you to which where I live can be a problem.

I tried taking dark frames with my CCD camera and I did it the way that they said to and all of them came out blue.

Next time I think I'll try ISO 100 and a 1 minute exposure. Then from there try going down in exposure time.

I did for laughs try to take a picture of M 51 and you can see it. Its not very bright but its there.

I want to thank the both of you for providing such a wonderful tutorial on astrophotography!  I love the pictures and the lessons!  I'm too chicken to try (and I haven't invested in the equipment )

Happy observing!

Tina

Ok I made a call to the people at Olympus and got a basic Idea where my setting on the camera should be. Just about full moon or not I had to try them and this is what I got.

It still has all those stupid red and blue dots in it but its I think its about the best I have done so far. Im almost thinking that its something that Im doing during processing thats making things worse. What I do is take a snap a picture with the camera lens cover on for a dark frame. I take the image that I want to work with and do a dark subtract. That takes the picture and turns the black sky into almost a grey one. I then stack the same image over and over and well you have seen some of what I have got. This is the MaxIm view of the picture above before I saved it to upload to photo bucket. This is just a desktop screen shot so please excuse the quality.

Oh these were shot at ISO 100.

This was also taken tonight except I have done nothing to it other then shrink the size to upload to photobucket.

Thanks again for the help, Its great.

I would not place too much faith on the word of a phone rep who works for the camera manufactures vendor customer service unless they have experience and knowledge of astrophotography.  Most are only familiar with terrestrial photography.   You need to be asking people with experience in both astrophotography and image processing.

When you're trying to take deep sky images near the bright moon phases you're probably exceeding the sky glow limit. Are you getting a washed out apperance in your shots, then trying to process them to make a darker image to bring out the DSO?  

I'm by far no expert at this, but I can help some, and where I can't I can point you in the right direction if I need to.

First a couple questions:
What camera are you using? and what setting are you using?
What ISO?
What length of exposure for each shot?
How often, how many and how long are you taking dark frames?
What Stacking and processing software are you using? 

Those pesky red dots are noise. I can see both hot and cold pixils in your images. This is where dark frames between each shot or a series of shots at or longer than the exposure of each helps. Extracting the darks from your images will remove much of that.  
Trying to enlarge the image and or overprocessing can or will also make your image appear too Noisy or grainy..

Have A Nice __________

I did ask to speak to someone at the camera makers support line that has done and knows about something about astrophotography and he seem'ed to know what he was talking about somewhat.

Im using an Olympus Evolt E-500 thats 8 megapixels.

The photo's in my last post were at ISO 100 as suggested by the support rep.

Exposure varies, when Im trying to get a sharp first focus, just a second or 2. Then I move to what I want to take a picture of and bump up to anywhere between 12 and 30 seconds and once in a great while 1 minute. The picture in my last post of M 3 was at 30 seconds at ISO 100. I tried it at a 12 second exposure and couldn't even see the cluster.

I have only been taking one dark frame that is just a matter of a second or 2. What I have been doing is just not putting a lens on the camera and leaving the camera's dust cover inplace where the lense would go and taking the dark frame that way.

Im using MaxIm DL Essentials for stacking and processing.

Iam also shooting in RAW mode instead of JPEG like I was before as the support rep suggested.

I don't try to enlarge the image at all. I would with it as is. The only thing I really do is take the image the I want to work with and stack it a few times and thats all. I have just started using the dark frame stuff from your suggestion before.

Taking pictures of the sky is alot harder then wildlife. Here's one of my wildlife pictures.

That was taken using a Meade 70mm refractor that i made into a telephoto lense.

Rich,

I can tell you from experience that using a radial offset guider and a illuminated reticule on my C8 with a 35 mm film camera I used to get those red glows on film from time to time.   You can also try using another guide star, sometimes just rotating the radial to another guide star will keep any internal reflections from the recticule from hitting your CCD.

The problem is that your reticule needs to be turned down in brightness, the radial offset guider with too bright a reticule eyepiece will cause internal reflections in the guider which show up on film and on CCD chips, You also need to take darks that match your planned exposures, and then employ dark subtraction.

Dennis

Im not using a radial guider or guide scope or anything at this timel. All these pictures have been with just the camera on a T-ring and T-adapter mounted right to the visual back of the telescope so I guess you would call it prime focus.

The E500 is what I have. I got that particular camera because it has the best red response of any of the current Oly DSLRs.

To get rid of your noise you need to take darks at all the same settings you're taking the lights at. I know some people who turn noise reduction on, all that does is basically takes a dark and subtracts it from the light "in camera". It adds a lot of time and also heats up the chip even more. I take 1 dark at the start and one at the end, depending on how many shots are in the sequence, I may take a few in the middle.

Focus of the E500 is tough. Are you using Studio? With that I take HQ JPEGs to get to focus, and create a slide show  of a star zoomed in at 2-300%, then choose the best one. To return to the exact focus setting I have a dial indicator set up I can take position readings from. Sounds complicated, but it ain't too bad. Trouble with the Oly's is there just isn't much out there for things like computer focus control. And the "bulb" setting is a pain.

Ya getting a good focus is hard. Im  not using anything except the little lcd on the camera right now. Im trying to see if there is a way to use the video part of the camera and hook that to my laptop and try to focus with that. The manual says that the noise reduction is to remove noise in long exposers. What happens is the chip heats up during a long exposure and thats what causes that big red thing in the corner of pictures. It also says that it about doubles the exposure time. Im not shooting with a zoom lens. The bulb setting isn't to bad I don't think. I don't have the remote so I can only go up to 1 minute exposure. With the remote you can go to 8 then the camera will stop the exposure because the chip heats up to much.  One thing I really love about the camera is the anti shock feature. I have mine set a 10 seconds and it seems fine. What it does is lock the mirror up waith the set time and then start the exposure. Got rid of any vibration the mirror caused as soon as I started using it.

Arghh! This damn forum. I had a bunch of stuff typed out for you and then lost it all when I went to get you a web address.

Anyway, just join this group, lot's of good stuff there on using these E-Volts.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/olympus_digital_slr_astrophotography/ 

I joined that group and downloaded that program that they were talking about to stack photo's with. Then I went out and just took pictures of polaris. One of the star and one dark on star one dark. I think I took 4 or 6 of each then stacked them with that program and got the same noise if not worse then with the program I was using. The pictures themself look great, no noise no streaking or anything. I only get that when I stack. Oh and both the light and dark pictures were taken at the same setting, only thing I did was put the lens cover on. There has to be something Im doing in the stacking that is totally screwing things up.

 For a practice run shoot SQ, then you don't have to worry about resizing or converting formats. Also make sure NR=off. Point into a star filled area of the sky, use ISO800 and try a couple different exposures till you get one that shows quite a few stars in the preview. Then take 1 dark, shoot 5 lights, then take 1 more dark. Save them to a folder, it doesn't sound like you're using Olympus Studio or Master. Start DSS and make sure you choose the lights and darks correctly, then check them all and choose all the auto functions of DSS. You ought to see some amp glow in the corner and DSS by subtracting the darks should remove it. The image comes out as a TIFF and you'll need to finish processing in whatever program you use. Make sure you delete any images you took when deciding on just what exposure you were going to use in the camera, you don't want them.

 You didn't say how you were transferring your images to your computer. You can download a free 30 day trial of Studio from the Olympus site.

Here's the sequence for DSS.

Click "open picture files" these are for your lights.

Click "open dark files" to choose the darks.

Click "check all"

Click "register checked pictures" let it finish.

Click "stack checked pictures" let it finish.

Finally click "save picture to file" the "autosave TIF" that's probably installed on your desk top is not what you need  to finish processing.

HTH 

I did like you  said, Had it ISO at 800 and took 25 second exposures. First dark the 5 light then one more dark.

I didn't see much if anything for auto options so maybe were using 2 different versions of DSS. Mine is version 3.2.1 I beleive.

Also when it goes to combine it warns that the files are jpeg but the are taken in SQ. It also says something about not being able to use them or do something with them.

I have been using olympus master when doing transfering the pictures. I also use the windows one for normal pictures and was using that at first for jpeg astro pictures. I also tried taking them right from the camera with DSS. That is what that pictures above is from.

Well, that looks like the TIFF from DSS, now you need to post process it.

Since you got a final image out of DSS, now it's time to shoot RAW. The OLY ORF RAW files will run in DSS with no problem.

What are you using for your image processing software? You can also get a trial version of PS CS3 from Adobe and I think also a trial of Elements 6.0. 

Once DSS finsihes the stacking process and loads the results you will see an image that looks like it is all washed out.  It will automatically save it as autosave.tiff. Do not make any other adjustments to your image using DSS.  
Save the image to whatever directory and file name of your choice. I save mine as a 16 bit tiff file in a seperate directory.  
You have two options for saving the image you see on DSS. One will be with the changes applied and the other with the changes embeded. If you save it with the changes applied then bring it up in another photo editing / processing program it will look over exposed as your image does there.
I save mine with the changes embeded, all the image data is still there to work with when I use another software application to complete the post processing.

One of the most popular programs is Photoshop. You can also use a program such as Pleiades PixINsight LE which you can download for free, and does a very good job..  A lot of people use the more expensive Photoshop CS which is hard to beat, and better be for that price.
I used PixInsight LE in the past, and also used Gimp which is kind of fun to play around with. However I now use Photoshop Elements 6 along with Noel Carboni's astronomy tools which make many operations easy. You have to purchase Noel's astronomy tools seperately from him.  You can google his name and find his site. It only cost around $20 bucks and is worth it.
Once I have finished processing the image I will save it as a JPG for uploading to photobucket if I want to post it on the forums.

Have A Nice _____________ 

I took the last image he left here and ran it through Elements. There's tracking and focus problems, but that's another issue. I also got a lot of banding, but probably because it has been converted to a low resolution JPEG and there wasn't much could be done.

There isn't enough information forth coming, but I think he got his images run with DSS. The auto-save TIFF isn't much good because it won't run in most applications and the DSS final image needs to be saved as Tim wrote.

I got Elements as a gift, but even at about $100 it's worth it. CS3 is just way out of line for most of us. 

John have you though of checking into Noel's astronomy tools? He has a couple tools in there that will take out a lot of that horizontal or vertical banding..

http://actions.home.att.net/Astronomy_Tools.html

Have A Nice _________