What you can do with basic equipment

Recently at a TAS talk I was asked what can be done with a basic set up. So I tried an experiment to show that you dont need CG11s



THis img was taken with

A Celestron 80ED BUT with a 45 diag that is so bad it effectively turns the cope into an achromat.
A 15 yr old Tasco non motorised eq mount.
To U cam in ordinary mode
Acquired with V record (The out of the box software)
Stacked usinng just the Automatic button on Regisatx and no photoshopping.
The scope was deliberately set up beside the house and imaged over an active chimney.
I hope this encourages people to try out no matter what gear you have.


Dave Gradwell

Wow, there's hope for me yet so! Dave, what about trying it with a lesser Logitech webcam?

By the way, thanks once again for that talk, it was an eye opener, and you got some people quite interested in astrophotography now!

Thats a very good image considering the set up...inspiration to us all

Dave - that's a great image for such a meagre (and realistic) setup. It really is quite amazing how far, even in recent years, imaging has come for amateur astronomers.

A word of caution to everyone though - if you're happy taking images of the moon and the planets for the rest of your days, and you're on a budget, this is a good setup.

Just because this setup can take a good moon image doesn't mean you're going to capture the full glory of M42.... Caveat emptor.

I say this beacuse I have spoken to many people over time and they seem disappointed when the system they thought they had could take images as good as, or close to, Hubble. Its a bit soul destroying to be the bearer of bad news, especially when the person thought the 4 figure sum they paid guaranteed them astounding images.

€0.02 as ever

Dave

Thats interesting dave, Just back from Kerry astronomy club meeting and I was asking Mike scully about webcaming the moon. How many frames did you use for that image, and how long exposure for each frame

Well seeing as you started it Dave here are my first two webcam images. Taken with a 22 euro Argos webcam on a 69 euro Lidl skylux, processed on 233mHz PC recovered from the skip with free software.




Astro imaging for less than 100 euro!

The quality is crap though but it did show me what was possible..

Michael Scully