Astrophotography

Matthew,
If you are interested in trying out a bit of astrophotography but don't want to commit any money, pm me your address and I'll send you up a Meade DSI. You can play with this for several months (no rush with it) as an imaging camera or an autoguider and when you're ready to move up to a bigger camera, just send it back.
Interested?

:shock: WHAT? :shock: Only here on this site do we find people like yourself micheal so willing to share with others for their benefit! it would really help to be honest! That would be brilliant! Ill pay for postage to and from of course and a coupla pints at the next star party!

Now you'll be able to use the spare cash to get that STL-11000M :lol:

Fair play Mike.
Thats what it's all about!

Mathew

I'm just starting to take deep sky objects have done a little with the moon and a little with the planets. I'm still very much beginning and just over a year in since my first shot with an spc900 webcam. For now I seem to know a huge number of ways to take bad pictures and a few ways to take ok ones. The chase element of this learning curve is and has been addictive. When I've achieved good shots the thrill I get is quite unbecomming an adult of supposed good professional standing (the night time garden happy dance is no stranger here). In case this experience is useful I'll outline the main points of it below:

o- Was using an LX200R 8" (fork mount, alt/az)
o- Bought an SPC900 1.25"; nose and an IR/UV filter my first target was Saturn, took 5 mins at prime focus. Stacked in registax and was uterly surprised with the result as it was a lot better than a visual saturn (I think I was hooked at that point).
o- The next night I tuned the camera on the moon and used a barlow to image saturn. The moon shot had all sorts of focus issues and was a disapointment. The Saturn shot was fantastic, polar banding, cassini divission, shadow of planet on the rings and everything.
o- I then got a canon400D
o- Planetary pics were a complete failure using the SLR.
o- It took me ages to get a good focus shot of the moon but when I did it was really good.
o- About the same time a good chance to image the moon came up and I used the spc900 to make a mosaic. I treated this as a learning test drive. I spent ages getting a good focus and a fair time taking 180s shots of the moon. I didn't process the images until a week later. They wer spectacular and the second best moon images I have to date. As I was just testing I didn't take shots away from the terminator. Really kicked myself for that as I didn't have a full illuminated disc mosaic.
o- I then picked up an equitorial wedge. The set up time on this is huge and a complete pain in the rear. However I successfully used the SPC900 to auto-guide and got some nice guided shots with the SLR mounted on the scope
o- The next step was to add an 80mm refractor and guide with one scope and image with the other. I ended up with a really good M45 pic via the SLR and the 80mm. At that point found that even on a dark night the max exposure is ~4min before the dublin sky glow wipes out everything. Also the set-up of LX200R, guidescope, counter weights, wedge and all was starting to defeat me.
Aside I did a lot of nights work from Feb to late may last year, then the summer and the rain and family matters reduced this to very few through to Sept. At that time I had to goto the UK for 3 months and that meant the only advnce all late 2007 was the nice shot of M45 mentioned above. The early part of this year was also sparse of good nights for me.
o- To start this season I got an EQ6. With the SLR and the 80mm I had some fun with this taking wide angle shots and the Iridium flar I posted in here earlier (that was a real thrill as I'd failed to get one for a long time, mostly through various incompetencies on my part)
o- I've just added a 254mm newtonian and have taken 2 DSO's one guiding with the 254mm and imaging with the 80mm/SLR, That was M81/M82 the other imaged 254mm/SLR guided through the 80mm.
For several reasons the EQ6 set up is much easier than the LX200 and I'll probably ditch the fork mount altogether in the future. (I may keep the LX200 OTA as it looks like the best planetary imager.It's also clearly mechanically better than the Meade mount.)

I could lend a spare SPC900 should you want to try it out.

All the very best and clear skies
Steve

Hi Steve,
I think many can relate to your story in imaging,
The EQ6 is a good mount and I at one time considered getting it for my MAK.
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