80mm F6 Prime Focus

[Tropo-Bob]

After 50+ years of observing, I have only recently become interested in Astrophotography.

I know next-to-nothing about stacking, stitching, blanks etc. Nevertheless, I am just amazed at what a mirror-less camera can take for a few seconds at prime focus and how well the results are. We are truly living in the future, or so it seems to a retiree like me.

I wanted to try for the Comet last night, but the clouds just would not give me the break I wanted. So I took these instead.

Taken with an 80mm F6 triplet and a contrast booster filter. There was no field flattener and there has been no further processing of the image beyond shedding resolution to meet the 500k per picture requirement.

Images: NGC 3766 in Centaurus, Omega Centauri and M57 (Ring Nebula).

[xelasnave]

You are a natural:thumbsup:..excellent work:thumbsup::thumbsup:.

Do yourself a big favour ..download Deep Sky Stacker..it is free and simple to use and all of a sudden 30 second captures seem to be the way to go..take a 100 or more check to make sure each one is near perfect and stack them....the results will surprise you.
alex

[Tinderboxsky]

Great shots, Bob.

[carlstronomy]

Nice work, welcome to the club :D

[Tropo-Bob]

Thanks very much guys,

I received a Baader 475nm filter today, so I took an image of sunset. The filter is said to be a light blue, but as U probably realise, 475nm is fairly close to green.

So the greenish image is the original and I also ran a 'Slate' filter over it and that give the black & white effect.

Some sunspots are visible.

The images has been cropped and off course, I also used a full aperture solar filter.

[Startrek]

Bob,
Those images are excellent
Well done !
Gee observing for over 50 years and only now getting into Astrophotography, you’ve started at a great time in this part of Amateur Astronomy as current technology has enabled imagers to produce mind boggling photos with just basic equipment.
Just a humble 6” Newt , a HEQ5 mount and an old Canon DSLR can produce fantastic images for under $3K ( that’s what I started with )
Looking forward to seeing your future images
Oh and Alex is spot on , Deep Sky Stacker is tremendous free software to stack your frames ( don’t use it for post processing its not really designed for that )
Cheers
Martin

[Averton]

Wow, that's a very effective shot Bob. :thumbsup:

[Averton]

Nice images Bob!:thumbsup:

[Tropo-Bob]

Taken this morning. My tracking still needs a little fine tuning.

Clare & Peter; Thanks for your kind remarks.

[LonelySpoon]

You are off to a great start, Bob!

Neville
LSO

[Averton]

Another fine image Bob :thumbsup:

[Tropo-Bob]

I imaged 9th magnitude Pallas this morning. Pallas is currently near Rigel and is moving close to the Orion Nebula.

I imaged this field a few days previously and found the interloper in this morning image.

I did strike problems with this. Although the image were taken under difficult conditions with clouds and the sky having developed a shade of pink before the clouds cleared enough for my shots; this was not the problem.

When I came to process the images, they were way, way too large for me to reduce the entire image down to an acceptable number of bits for display. I do not understand why. I ended up cropping the image and that now only shows a small part of my original photo.

I have much to learn ...

[Tropo-Bob]

I now understand why the previous photos were so large: I had the ISO too high and this adds to the noise/grain, which then adds to the size of the image.

[Tropo-Bob]

A photo of M41 that I took this morning just as the lower sky was turning a shade of pink.

I have a UV/IR cutoff filter on order. I assume that this will help reduce bloating in the size of the stars.