Hello esteemed astrophotographers! I have finally taking the first step of the perilous and challenging road of imaging far away places in the sky.
Last night I worked up enough courage to finally put the new 90mm F5.5 refractor, I picked up from China a few weeks ago, on the mount, and attach the necessary adapters I have been slowly buying, to my unmodified Canon 450D, and connect camera to said telescope.
While seeing wasn't great, I chose a popular target, 47 Tuc, that wouldn't take a whole lot of processing to realize a suitable image for my scrapbook.
Took on a very basic workflow, 20 45 second exposures, at ISO 800 and 10 darks. Stacked and processed in DSS with default settings (mostly). A little more touch up using Cyberlink PhotoDirector (like Photoshop) and export to JPEG.
Some things I can identify right away and hope will be confirmed...
- Stars not round probably due to mount not being perfectly polar aligned. Maybe some mount instability? Maybe focus out just a wee little bit.
- Coma fringing in either the scope or the camera. Images of super bright objects with a standard Canon lens also show purple fringing
- Could improve aesthetically by cropping to just the cluster or inserting a X2 barlow and centering on the cluster
Mount is a HEQ5 Pro, 2 star aligned, sitting on grass for 2 days. Telescope is made by Aquila, more probably Synta in the end. Good build overall, solid metal casing and 10:1 focuser.
The JPEG probably won't do it justice so for those who want a look at the TIF, I've tried to share it out on Onedrive via the link below.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AlH7c1YqjBS4g60yYJuWvDirjVcviA
Any comments welcome!