Preview images with the new Canon Digital Rebel (300D)

Jan 19, 2004

I had near perfect sky conditions last night and mag 4 zenith skies ( ZLM). So equipped with my new T-mount and cable release for the Canon Digital Rebel, I decided to take some first light shots using the Tak 106, Celestron CGE mount, AP 80/900mm guidescope, and the ST-7 as an autoguider.

Proper focus took a while, and I found that it was best to just take short images, download them to the PC, and view them while making small adjustments in between.  The eyefinder gives a close enough focus to make this method quite easy, though it took me a while to figure this out last night. I did my focusing on M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, but it dropped behind the trees before I had a chance to do anything good with it.

The remainder of the evening was spent imaging M45 and the M42 region, in that order. I took eight 5 minute exposures of M45 and eighteen 5 minute exposures of the M42 area. All exposures were set for ISO 800. I also discovered that stacking so many RGB images is a very difficult and time consuming process, and I might have to look into purchasing a piece of software called Images Plus to make my life easier…this software is designed specifically for digital SLRs.

Because it may take some time to process the complete results, I decided to post a single 5 minute exposure of each object. I wanted to give you an idea of the capabilities of this camera in such a short exposure…and this is without an kind of modification to the IR filter.

The only processing done on these shots is a levels adjustment to give the correct range of brightness values…that’s it…no noise reduction…no nothing! I then resized them and saved to a smaller file for display here.

M45 - The Pleiades - single 5 minute exposure