Antares and NGC6144

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

The clouds stayed away just long enough to get one object, then filled the sky with their photo ruining presence.

Anyway this is Antares and NGC 6144, a nearby magnitude 9.1 globular. This is 69 x 30 second frames at ISO 1600 through a 6" F5 Newtonian, Baader MPCC MKIII coma corrector, Pentax K-x.

[nebulosity. (Jo)]

Nice little glob Kevin, I thing I captured it in my wide field of this area. Looks like you are having lots of fun with your newt, great when ya have a setup that works and produces images like these

Can't wait to finish my F5 newt, have been working on making an OAG that will fit between a CC and the camera. Your Baader is working well by the looks, I'm hoping to get the SkyWatcher 0.9x to give me a bit more imaging speed.

Jo

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks Jo. Yes I've been having fun getting this little Newt DSLR capable. I used to use it for film astrophotography in the 1990's and digital video around 2000. With the small CCD of the video camera a coma corrector wasn't necessary.

I looked at a few correctors. The cheaper Skywatcher was one. The one I was looking at increased focal length by 1.1 and needed 17mm of in focus, something that would be difficult with my system. The Baader MKIII needs 6mm of out focus so that was easy and also gives a 1:1 focal ratio so I went with that.

Even with 30 second exposures, this setup produces nice results which will be good when I'm lazy! Longer subs will be needed for nebula though.

I'm sure your 8" F5 will produce spectacular images!

[Dennis]

That’s a really nice field and I always enjoy any time spent loitering and exploring in this region.

Cheers

Dennis

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks Dennis. There's lots in this region to explore! (And I will torture you all with pics of that in the coming days)