[5ash (Philip)]

last week i took some shots of orion and the running man nebulas using a home made focal reducer (~F4.2) on my Lx90 8" SCT. There was a lot of coma and field curvature but the centre of the pics seem fine. I stitched them using photostitch and cropped the result to give the final picture. The pictures were 90s pics taken at iso 400 and 800 and stacked to give the pictures used in the final mozaic and processed in images plus. Im probably stretching it a little using F4.2 but it does enable me to emulate some of the wide field shots using faster telescopes. The contrast of the SCT is lacking compared to the smaller ed refractors but i am still experimenting at this F ratio.
philip