hey people. After 14 years of visual observing i am finnaly dabling with imaging. After a friend of mine let me borrow his CCD camera, i have taken the following pics. These are my first ever images.
All shots are taken at prime focus on a F10 (3048mm) 12" LX200GPS, in equatorial mode.
Each image is over 500 stacks.
Seeing was absolutly rubbish, and atmosphere was unsteady as hell.
i think a lot of it has to do with collimation. I spent 2 hours collimating the scope with a star test on sirius. I used a magnification of 952X and got perfect concentric rings.
Thing is, as soon as i slew the scope, it looses colliation, even more so the more you slew it.
I was going to ask about your collimation when i left it was still giving you greif. did you figure out what was chopping off the secondary mirror reflection?
If i remember correctly its a dmk31 that grahame has and i can attest to its very good resolution though possibly if it doesn't have the IR filter it will need one as this will further blur the image (IR doesn't focus where visual light does).
yeah it was the rotation of the secondary (there missaligned on purpose as there matched to the primary) i rotated it to the correct markings and the shadow was gone. Also the scope colimated perfectly. It just keeps loosing colimation very easily.
With respect to loosing collimation, talk to multiweb (username) he did a modification to his Celestron C11 for mirror locking never know it might just work for you and in any case i can help you with the mod as long as i know what is happening as i have all the tools at my disposal.
Serious!
The moon is a great target while you're learning.
