C6 again!

Thanks for that advice Dave,I will defintely have to get myself a focal reducer. Would this be the possible reason for not seeing the Eagle and Swan?
Bill.

Bill,
These nebulae are fairly faint, try get a nebula filter if you want to do visual work on these..
they really help, when I tried if on the veil nebila in cygnus for the first time, I was amazed at the differance it made.
One of my books here tells me that you need atleast a 10 inch to see any kind of detail on the Eagle, so the 8" is probabily good enough for photographic work.

Bill - these are nice images. Focus is spot on. And what gets me is the colour! I have terrible problems with colour in the DSI but I'm not too fussed about it - I just image in grayscale.

As far as galaxies go, whats your scope setup? I think its 8" but whats the focal length? My galaxy images are taken with a 6.3 focal reducer - the whirlpool still doesn;t fit on the chip though. Actually, the images on my site who what you 'can' fit on with an F10 8" sct with a 6.3 reducer...

But to 'see' them, I normally shoot a 5 sec expsoure with the auto contrast bumped up to '2' - this should show you the core. That's all. You'll only see the rest of the galaxy when you start stacking. When I first tried in fact, I saw nothing - just like you.

By the way, once you focus (say on jupiter's moons or your favourite object) you won't need to focus again. I set the focus once at the start of the session - and that's it. Mirror flop can be an issue but its not given me any heartburn yet. And I haven't got to the level of temperature compensated nano-drive super accurate focusers. Yet

Keep it up Bill and don;t forget the insurance.

Cheers


Dave McD