I played around with IRIS last night for the first time & decided to do an uncropped version of my M42 image showing the full FOV I get with the EOS. I looked at IRIS previously & it was a programing nightmare (not user friendly at all) The new version has direct support for RAW files from digital camera (EOS at least) & the programming is a lot easier - almost windows friendly. The attached is the same 10 images stacked & aligned & stacked in Iris with minimal adjustment in Photoshop.
Cheers, John
(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.punnett/graphics/oas/M42_Wide_Iris.jpg)
Like wow!
the pic has captured a lot of the nebula usually missing, excellent.
how did you get on with focus? or is the lens correctly marked for infinity?
Hi Ian,
I have purchase some s/w called DSLR focus - I connect my camera to my laptop using a USB cable - When I run the focus software it basically takes an image (low reolution) & downloads it to the PC. You then select a suitable star in the image using a box. The s/w analyzes the star i.e. diameter, brightness, width verses height (i.e. how round it is)- You adjust focus & then grab another image. This image is compared with the last (you can check numbers & graphs etc.) to make sure focus is improving. You continue this way until best focus is achieve. The procedure is the same whether you are focus using a lens or through a telescope.
Link to s/w is:
http://www.dslrfocus.com/
I've also made up a small interface lead to the parallel port on my laptop & use the same s/w for capturing the images (sequences of images).
All in all it's quite painless - A lot easier than trying to use the viewfinder...
Cheers, John
Ian,
The lens was my Skywatch 80mm F5. Great shot isn't it, you should have seen the fog and sky glow John had.