my first attempt at widefield with CCD

[mindburner]

I have been doing some CCD imaging for a couple of years now. Actually that amounts to about 20 nights in total due to weather

I got the bug for widefield after seeing the stellar images that many have been able to produce, many of which have been down on modest equipment, DSLR's and so on. 

I had a go with a modded canon 1100d with poor results, gradients, red fringing etc. 

so I longed to get my 428ex to bear on WF. This is a smll imaging camera but I thought It may suite the canon 50mm 1.8 lens quite well for a number of targets.

Well it was adapter time. The Geoptik adapter looks very nice and does the job I hear. It is expensive though, so I did some research and bodged up one of my own.

The first thing I  used was a Canon macro set from ebay, cost around £7 from China:

I used the end cap from a Canon lens plus a M60 to T2 adapter from Clever Engineering

I ended up using the 1mm spacer from the macro extension set and just pressed it down firmly over the Canon cap, which now had a nice hole in it thanks to my trusty hole saw which fitted the circle etched on the cap perfectly. This was very firm and provided a female thread to which I could connect the M60 to T2 adapter. I can also fit an internal 2" filter although it's  a little akward if this needs to be removed as it involves breaking the adapter apart.

The adapter seems to work well, which is more than can be said for my rather pants dew shield. More work is needed on this I think

Here's the finished adpater:

Here's it on my DIY imaging setup mounted with a cheapo ebay lens ring:

Anyway I managed to get about 90 mins of 5 and 7 min subs of the NGC7000, North America nebula/ It's not that detailed but I was very please as my previous efforts have been really bad with just a blurry mess.

50mm 1.8 stopped down to f4 (sorry camera for the removal shock  ), Atik 428ex OSC at -10,guided with PHD

[Dave_D]

nothing shabby about that image

[mindburner]

hi many thanks, had another bash at it, this time with DSS