M27 - Sunday 07 Aug 2005

Great shot Dave.

It will be interesting to see how deep we can go once you start autguiding!

Jed.

Thats a stunning photograph Dave!!! :shock:

Prove it wasnt a fluke and do another one!!!! Only joking...

Move over Hubble!!!!!

I think the "bar" has just been raised about 3 feet Dave.

.. now where did I leave that disposabe camera...... :lol:

Liam

Dave,
Thats a great image, fine definition and good focus.
The canon is a fab camera and you definitely for its worht there.
I think this is the start of a long career in astrophotography for you.
I look for ward to seeing more in the future.

Do you find the Parks LPR requires you to extend your exposures by much?

Thats the big find for me. I bought the parks LPR on a whim when I was in the states a few years back. The thing I've noticed is that It seems to have a far better tradeoff between reducing light pollution and dimming starlight than other LPRs i've seen. I suppose I could do some quantative test, but I'd say the light loss is still somewhere in the 10% region. Of course these types of filters will always perform better on nebulae like M27 than on stuff like galaxies anyway

Also, do you have some sort of PE installed on the mount? There's absolutely no trailing whatsoever in the image - the mark of a great mount (in the hands of an expert tuning wizard ) for a two minute single exposure!

Thats the thing Dave, there is absolutely no PEC on the CG5 at all. I never expected to get two minutes out of it. I started with a 30sec exp, when i saw that was well within tolerance, I went for 1 min, then I thought why not try two minutes. I even went for a three minute exposure, problem with that was the focus had shifted slightly, so its hard to determine what the tracking was like. What excites me is it would seem easy enough to get several minutes exposure times by even minimal guiding. The tuning I did doesnt come into it, I just tweaked the dec axis, the RA axis seemed spot on out of the box.

Thanks for the comments Dave, I hope it wasnt just luck! I do think I could repeat it given the transparancy we had on Sunday night,

Great shot Dave.

It will be interesting to see how deep we can go once you start autguiding!

Jed.

Yep I cant wait. So get yer ST4 and your 350D over here man and lets find out!

BTW what Jed failed to mention in his introductory post is that Jed doesnt just live in any old part of Mayo he lives miles away from any source of light pollution. The skies there are indescribable! The nearest thing he has to light pollution is the glow from the radioactive sheep! So I'm looking forward to seeing some serious astrophotos coming out of Mayo.

Unguided for 2 minutes? - Didn't think you could go much higher than about 30 seconds without star trails!

Neither did I John!! I didnt even drift align I just used the auto polar align feature on the CG5 mount! But as I kept increasing the exposure time and didnt see any trailing, I just kept going. Reducing the F10 C9.25 to F6.3 was the real kicker that made this work, I feel.