Houston Half Moon M101 - 53 Frames (Adam Jackson)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: M 101 · NGC 5457

Houston Half Moon M101 - 53 Frames

This is my first official astrophotograph ever taken using a telescope and a mount. I used the Optolong L-Pro skyglow filter to help combat the Houston light pollution and last night was a half moon out. It was a rare non-cloudy not really that humid night in Houston so I decided to get some much needed practice setting up the mount, all the camera equipment, and guider. I should have taken dark frames but my wife wanted to me to come watch Billions with her. This is a total of 53 30-second ISO 1600 light frames using my Nikon D750a attached to a Takahashi FSQ-85 guided by a Takahashi FS-60CB over ASIair.

Post processing was a challenge because the files were a mess with no flats or darks taken. I adjusted the WB in Lightroom and then converted to TIF. I uploaded to DeepSkyStacker to combine and sent the TIF over to Lightroom for levels and curves. I can tell that this whole process would be much more exciting at a dark sky site. I intend to head to the Guadalupe Mountains next week to get some deep Milky Way shots.

I've got a long ways to go but so far I am so glad I decided to jump in and start doing this.

Final
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C

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Description: Straight out of camera RAW

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C

Description: Color corrected TIF loaded into DeepSkyStacker

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2693328
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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Houston Half Moon M101 - 53 Frames

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