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The view from by back garden.

(Through a honking great telescope)

Very nice :) What's your setup?

I took this tonight with my very budget rig:

2015-01-16%20-%20Comet%20Lovejoy%20Small.png
 
Very nice :) What's your setup?

I took this tonight with my very budget rig:

http://www.cavaye.com/stuff/astro/2015-01-16%20-%20Comet%20Lovejoy%20Small.png[IMG][/QUOTE]

Wow, you took that with a budget rig? :eek:

Hell of a lot better than I managed. I took 49 20 second exposures and tried stacking them, and... pixelated green blob. Would have taken more exposures, but my laptop decided to go to sleep because it wasn't plugged in. Stupid power settings.

My setup is a 10 inch dobsonian on a computerised mount, with a ZWO ASI120MC camera. Dobs aren't really good for taking photos of faint objects, because the exposure time for each frame needs to be quite long, so you get smearing from field rotation. Also, its tracking motors aren't as accurate as I'd like. For a real astrophotography rig, it would cost thousands of pounds, a big scope on a heavy duty equatorial mount, a tracking scope mounted on the side, and a wildly expensive camera. Would love to know how you managed to get that shot of Comet Lovejoy with a budget rig.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/7VecavI.jpg

wIwwoMZ.jpg
 
I have an 8" Skywatcher dob (200P) for observing but, as you said, they're not great for photos and mine's not got any tracking at all.

For that photo I used a £120 Startravel 80 on EQ1 with a £30 RA drive that I modded to run off the mains. It's a pain in the a*s* to polar align because it's an awful mount and the motor is awful as well, but it allows me to get up to 15-20 second exposures (compared with 0.5 second on my dob) if I'm willing to throw 2/3 of them away :)

That photo was made up from 24 x 15 second exposures on that setup (using a Canon 550D and £10 amazon remote shutter control) so it's about 6 minutes total exposure. It's incredible what you can do in the processing of such poor data :)

2014-08-31%20-%20M57%20Ring%20Nebula%20Inset.png


2014-08-31%20-%20M31%20Andromeda%20Galaxy%20(M32%20and%20M110).png


(And these planets are from using my point & shoot to record video at the EP of my dob)
Planets2.png


(Not mine...)
** No hotlinked images **
http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/f...lic/pia17172_full_annotated.jpg?itok=zK2m8KsX

http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/.../14707891-1-eng-GB/Comet_on_3_August_2014.png
 
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