I've been doing short-exposure, wide-field DSLR astrophotography for years but I've yearned for greater reach and longer exposures to capture nebulas and other DSOs. Several months ago I bought a Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracking platform and started shooting decent shots up to 135mm with my Canon 5D3. I initially tried some shots with my Sigma 50-500mm telephoto with poor results - every shot showed random camera shake.
Last weekend I was away from the city and in a "what the heck" moment, decided to give it another try. To my astonishment, I was able to get some decent results! I set up a 32 shot, 1hr sequence of M42 and though I had to toss more than half of the photos due to camera shake, I had enough to process in Pixinsight (with dark and bias frames, but no flats) and got this result which blew me away!
You can see the photo in higher quality here:
https://neilcreek.smugmug.com/Folio/...py/i-5smbNHM/A
I plan to do more shots like this, but it's really convinced me that this is the kind of shot I want to do in the future, so I'm researching a proper astrophotography setup.
15x2min
f6.3 ISO1600
500mm