First Light - Canon 50mm Lens and ST8300

[Martin Pugh]

Hi all
for those of you who have followed the long thread in the Equipment forum will know that I have been in pursuit of a widefield solution for sometime.

With your help, I managed to get satisfactory results out of the Canon 50mm f1.2 L lens when paired with an SBIG ST8300.

So, having worked through that, I took my first HaRGB image tonight - nice and quick i.e 60:10:10:10 minutes centred on Eta Carinae.

http://www.martinpughastrophotography.id.a u/Canon50mmST8300HaRGB.jpg

The RGB 60 second subs were unguided and each set of integrations was manually focussed (havent sorted that out yet).
Its a bit noisy I think, but I am fairly happy I have the widefield solution I was looking for with this now, so thanks to you all who contributed to that.
cheers
Martin

[Stevec35]

Looks good Martin

Cheers

Steve

[cventer]

Nice work.

Can you show some pics of how you got it all together in the end. What adapters and what filter wheel you ended up using on the st8300

[gregbradley]

You conquered the coma and tilt problem Well done.

The image seems very dark though. I take it you stopped the lens down heavily. There's always some compromises eh?

Nice colours and a nice wide view.

Greg.

[iceman]

Wow that's really nice, what a FOV.

What aperture did you end up using?
Did you have to crop much from the edges? They look pretty clean!

[Warhen]

Always beautiful Martin!

[jamiep]

Martin - really nice image - well done.

I'd love to see how you managed to bring it all together from a connection perspective.

Well done!

Jamie

[Peter Ward]

A great result!

Eta Carina? By this esoteric choice of subject :)... can we assume you are back in Oz?

If so welcome back!

[Martin Pugh]

Thanks all.
There is nothing really worth taking a picture of:

It is the SBIG supplied Canon adapter, and the 8 position CFW.
The camera is attached to a standard Manfrotto camera mount. As you know, these have a mounting clip which screws into bottom of the camera. The Manfrotto itself is bolted with one screw to the saddle plate on the mount. That's it.

Other than that, the lens is at f4.5, but I did notice that the brighter stars were far more bloated (even after focussing) when I moved to the blue filter. Not ED glass obviously!

Greg - yep, I am using a HP 25" LCD monitor, which are known to be 'bright' when compared to CRTs (another reason why you should not print astrophotographs when using these monitors). So while it appeared right on mine, no doubt it is dark on others.

Peter - yes, back in Australia - got here mid Dec. RCOS not back on yet, still playing with the Solarmax DS90 and this Canon Lens. The RC will be back on before winter sets in....hoping to get that 1.5" arcsec seeing I was used to here in Yass before I departed.

cheers
Martin