Hi All,
The Monday night forecast looked good so I packed my camera gear and 22" Dob and went to my favourite spot in Flinders. After setting up the panning time-lapse Greg and I had a rather long observing session. The seeing was average so we stayed at low powers and the highlight of the night were a few galaxies near LMC (in Dorado and Volans).
The time lapse is
here (23MB MP4)
Less bandwidth consuming but lower quality video is
here on Vimeo
At the end of observing Greg (from MPAS) lent me his Pentax K-x, I put it into the focuser of my Dobsonian and took my
first ever DSO image through the telescope. It was windy and my Dob astro-photography expectations were quite low, but I rather liked the result on the camera screen so kept going. Because of the wind I could only use two frames of the Keyhole nebula and the result is attached below.
Finally I feel my post in the Deep Space section is justified
Tech data below.
Timelapse
Nikon D700, 14-24mm lens, ISO 3200, 754 frames x 30sec
Orion Teletrack motorised mount for panning effect
Keyhole Nebula
Telescope: 22" f/3.6 reflector on Alt-Az Dobsonian mount with imaging Paracorr
Camera: Pentax K-x
Image:
2 x 6 second frames at ISO6400
Processing: DSS for stacking and Photoshop CS5 for levels, noise reduction and sharpening. The final frame is not cropped, just resized.
Cheers,
Alex