[Hoges (John)]

My 100mm F5 Acro refractor is not very good for astrophotography because of the huge blue halos around anything bright. But I thought I'd try some photography using my Baader Semi Apo and Orion V block filters. They actually did make a much bigger difference photographically than they do visually. I screwed the V Block filter (which seemed to control the CA a little better than the Semi-Apo) into the end of an eyepiece, then removed the silver barrel section of the eyepiece so it could slide inside the 2" to 1 1/4" reducer that my camera fits to. This is a single 99 sec exposure iso 1600 unguided on an HEQ5 mount. (Pentax K50) There was some noise reduction and CA processing in Lightroom along with some exposure/contrast/vignetting adjusting. There's still some CA evident but it's way better than an unfiltered shot. I know it's not very sharp but one day I will get an autoguider and appropriate mount to suit which will help immensely. One other problem I became aware of is that any bright objects seemed to reflect off the V block filter back onto the sensor producing some nice big purple circular artifacts - oh well, rob Peter, pay Paul!