Posts Made By: Don Spencer

Beautiful shot!

I smoothed out the noise a little further...what do ya think?
Don Spencer

amazing! You are really on
the cutting e.dge...
keep up the .....good ...work
...

Hi Chris.
1) For astrophotography, you really need very accurate polar alignment. Here are some pointers. USe the Itteration method first. With practice, this will get you accuratly aligned enough to shoot piggyback photography.
Itteration method:
Go through your normal polar alignment procedure.
Once you have synced on the 2nd star (Enif for example), go back to polaris. Note: for these next steps, your finder scope needs to be accuratly aligned with your scope.:
You should see Polaris in the finder. With the wedge's manual adjustments, move Polaris 1/2 distance from where it is at, towards the finder scopes center crosshairs. DO NOT HIT ENTER on the hand paddle. Select star, star name, enif, goto to go back to enif. Using the hand paddle, center enif in a high powered eye piece (I use the Celestron Microguide eyepiece, which I believe is a 12mm). Repeat these steps until your last adjustment on Polaris is done through the high powered eyepiece, go back to enif one final time and center and sync (remember to sync each time after centering enif). This will get you a real good (but maybe not exact) polar alignment. I have done this numerous times where I did not have to make any adjustments to my additional drift alignment (which you will need to learn if you want quality photos from your scope).

2) You probably should learn how to knife edge focus the camera, but it is challenging. You can go with the Stiletto, which I have used with some success. Again, this takes some practice to use.

3) My suspecion is that you will need a longer extension tube to bring the camera to focus with the focal reducer.
For more info, check out these web sites.
http://www.astrocruise.com/
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP.HTM

I hope this helps,
Don Spencer

Chris,
Like the other post before me, you will need to stop the lens down to reduce the vignetting. This photo looks like it was taken from a light polluted site, is that correct? If so and you plan to shoot piggy back from this site, you may want to invest in some sort of light pollution filter for your lenses. Huetec (sp?) makes a great filter and I believe they have one for camera lenses.
Great start. This was a nice shot for your first attempt.
Don Spencer

see, I told you they could help! :-)

Hey Todd,
This is one of the finest images I have seen of this region. Nicely done!
Don Spencer

Hi Alex,
Well, everything is relational. A 4" F/5 refractor probably won't do so well on something like the Leo Trio, but would be great at picking up M8 & M20, while a 12" SCT could never pick up both of these, but could do wonders on objects such as M33. My suggestion is, if you can afford to do it, pick up a copy of "The Sky". It has a "Field of View" setting that you can configure your aperature size, focal lenth, and either eye piece or 35mm film FOVs. If you don't have or can't pick up a copy of "The Sky", let me know what scope you are using and I would be glad to offer up some suggestions.
Don Spencer

Looks like it's just a brighter part of the nebula. I looked in "The Sky" and set galaxies to mag 30, but nothing showed up in that area.
Don Spencer

I reworked the photo...