(February 20, 2012 at 10:36 pm)orogenicman Wrote: Thanks. The real issue with the earlier ones was that the stars had bloomed during processing, and so were way over exposed. Once I fixed that, the entire image looks a lot better.
I agree. The stars in your last image are far better than the first - though honestly, I did not notice in your earlier images because the nebula was so eye-popping beautiful. It's amazing what post-processing can do, especially when you're stacking many, many images that can each have their own post-processing applied.
Quote: Here is the list of the equipment used:
Camera:
Hutech Modified Canon T1i with Baader Coma corrector and Baader UV-IR cut filter
Equipment:
200mm f5 Modified Konus Newtonian OTA
Losmandy G-11 GEM with Gemini Go To
80mm f5 Orion Shorty Autoguide scope with Orion Star Shooter autoguider
Losmandy heavy duty tripod.
Conditions:
Transparency - Good
Seeing - poor
Temperature - 20 Degrees F
Nice setup. It's really nice to see that you can do nice quality deep-sky images with a modest-sized scope. Versatile setup as well, I bet you can mount just about any reasonably sided OTA on the G-11 that you could want - not that there's anything wrong with your Konus at all, especially for this type of imaging. Throw a nice achromatic refractor on it and you'd be set for planetary imaging. You know what I mean.
My primary rig is a Meade 10" f/6.3 LX-200 on the standard tripod with a piggybacked 80mm f/5 shorty refractor (pretty much same as yours) that I use as both a finder and for wide field viewing. Pretty decent collection of Nagler, Panoptic, and plossl eyepieces, though I'm finding I use only a couple of them most of the time. Big heavy sucker, but it was the biggest computer-controlled light bucket I could fit in the trunk of my car at the time. Back then, I really wanted the computer control and there weren't a lot of options in my price range.
I used to have a 12" f/5 truss dob that I built myself. Given the amount of setup time and travel time to a site that was dark enough to make it worth taking, I found I didn't use it often enough and ended up selling the optics after a couple of years. My rural yard just wasn't dark enough. Still have the OTA and mount in the attic of my shop. Also still have my first real scope, an old Celestron 8" dob with many custom improvements - I still use it when I just want a quick look at something from the yard and don't want to be bothered to set up a tripod.
I decided astrophotography wasn't for me, but a decade or so ago I used to shoot on 35mm film using a basic Olympus OM-1 through the OTA (using a wedge and a f/3.3 focal reducer when needed), or mounted on top for wide-field shots. I was too poor to afford a decent CCD at the time and have since moved on, and hand-guiding required patience and cold tolerance that I did not have.
I played around with shooting starfields after that and found that what I really loved to do was just gaze at the stars, with or without optical aid - so I left the shooting of pretty pictures to those who were much better at it than I.
Best night of observing ever, I set up an 8" dob on a mountaintop east of Portland, and noticed that I was being treated to a nice aurora borealis (at 44-45 deg latitude, very rare) as well as a nice meteor shower. I never even opened up the eyepiece case - I just lay on my back on a blanket and watched until the wee hours of the morning.
