Hello All,
A little over a week ago I mentioned that I had purchased the Orion SteadyStar Adaptive Optics Unit in the hope of improving the quality of my astrophotos.
I have an older (black) EQ6 mount and although I have tried just about everything short of re-building it from the ground up, unfortunately it still has enough PE to make it difficult to end up with nice round stars when using exposure settings greater than one or two minutes.
After several days of poor weather, finaly, the sky cleared enough a couple of nights ago for me to capture a couple of half decent test images.
Well to cut a long story short, just let me say that I am VERY happy with the operation of the AO unit and although it was rather expensive, it is still far a lower cost than a new higher quality mount.
I think that for me, it has transformed my ability to do astrophotography with the EQ6 mount.
If interested, you can view a test image at this location.
It is a combination of three 10 minute frames of a part of the Lagoon Nebular, captured with a 250mm GSO RC scope @ F8 and QSI520ci camera.
The frames were captured with Nebulosity and a small amount of processing done with PixInsight. No bias, dark, or flat frames were used.
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/11147...09302617732178
I would be interested in what people think.
Cheers,
Luke