A few images from recent clear skies

Tzetze

We've been lucky to have 6 or 7 clear nights in the past couple of weeks. I've been getting my teeth into a bit of Astrophotography - still very much a newbie, but am enjoying trying to climb this steep learning cliff-face!

M31 - Andromeda Galaxy


M45 - The Pleiades


M13 - Great Globular Cluster in Hercules


M92 - Globular Cluster in Hercules



Equipment used;
Celestron c10-ngt
Bresser Skylux 70/700 refractor (LIDL scope)
Canon EOS 450D
APT-Astro Photography Tool
Nebulosity 2.4
Lightroom


The two globular cluster shots were taken through the 10" Newt. It's quite unstable for imaging on a cg-5 mount. Requires a still night and am limited to 60s exposures (a lot of wasted exposures at that). Gives decent enough results though at short exposures. I only got 10x 60s exposures of M92 tonight before the clouds rolled in. The shot of M13 is made up of 30x 30s exposures.

I picked up a LIDL refractor for use as a guide scope in the future when I plan to get my hands on a ED 80 apo refractor, but decided to give it a lash at imaging in the meantime (M31 and M45). There's some noticable chromatic abberation, but I'm happy enough with the results from what is essentially a very cheap scope!

Edit: Worked on the processing of M92 some more and edited to link to the newer version

calabi yau

These are beautiful man, thanks very much.

NoQuarter

MOAR!!!

slade_x

Nicely done, are you using a tmount or just tripod mounting the dslr with its lens in front of the telescope lens?

Tzetze

slade_x wrote: »

Nicely done, are you using a tmount or just tripod mounting the dslr with its lens in front of the telescope lens?

Thanks guys! Camera was attached to both scopes with a t-adapter and shot at prime focus.

Plug

Very nice. Do you use the eye pieces or is there a need to since the camera has zoom? Im not experienced in this at all but I have a little webcam at home and would like to try it out sometime.

Tzetze

Plug wrote: »

Very nice. Do you use the eye pieces or is there a need to since the camera has zoom? Im not experienced in this at all but I have a little webcam at home and would like to try it out sometime.

Thanks Plug. I neither use an eyepiece or 'zoom'. The lens is removed from the camera and an adapter is attached (where the lens should be) to mount the camera into the eyepiece holder of the telescope. I then use the telescope focusing mechanism to achieve focus in the camera.

I've not used a webcam for the job and know nothing about it other than the fact that it's used for creating planetary images from .avi files. Google 'webcam astrophotography' for more info.