Newbie astrophotographer first photos

[rousey346]

hey people. After 14 years of visual observing i am finnaly dabling with imaging. After a friend of mine let me borrow his CCD camera, i have taken the following pics. These are my first ever images.
All shots are taken at prime focus on a F10 (3048mm) 12" LX200GPS, in equatorial mode.

Each image is over 500 stacks.


Seeing was absolutly rubbish, and atmosphere was unsteady as hell.

[ballaratdragons]

Wow, Jay, if these are your first images then we are in for a treat as you get better!

Well done :thumbsup:

My first images were of blobs and blurrs :lol: Serious!

[iceman]

Great start for the conditions, Jay.

Looks like you've got a good camera to start off with. A DMK21?

Keep with monochrome for a while, as adding RGB filters is another world of hurt :) The moon is a great target while you're learning.

[rousey346]

seeing was a little better, still very very poor though, has been some high level cirus cloud, and lots of light polution where i am.

Was captured at f10.
1000 images stacked in registax. Will pump the focal lenth up to f20 tommorow night

[ballaratdragons]

Jay,

when you look thru the blurriness, there is some very nice fine detail in there. I'm sure with some fiddling in processing you could bring it out.

Nice going.

[rousey346]

i think a lot of it has to do with collimation. I spent 2 hours collimating the scope with a star test on sirius. I used a magnification of 952X and got perfect concentric rings.
Thing is, as soon as i slew the scope, it looses colliation, even more so the more you slew it.

Will have to get that checked.

[bmitchell82]

Hey Jay,

I was going to ask about your collimation when i left it was still giving you greif. did you figure out what was chopping off the secondary mirror reflection?

If i remember correctly its a dmk31 that grahame has and i can attest to its very good resolution though possibly if it doesn't have the IR filter it will need one as this will further blur the image (IR doesn't focus where visual light does).

Happy days and keep on trooping!

Brendan :thumbsup:

[rousey346]

yeah it was the rotation of the secondary (there missaligned on purpose as there matched to the primary) i rotated it to the correct markings and the shadow was gone. Also the scope colimated perfectly. It just keeps loosing colimation very easily.

Yeah i was using a IR filter

[bmitchell82]

With respect to loosing collimation, talk to multiweb (username) he did a modification to his Celestron C11 for mirror locking never know it might just work for you and in any case i can help you with the mod as long as i know what is happening as i have all the tools at my disposal.

talk to you then

BM