M57 with Dob

[Scooot]

After my attempts the other night at Vega I had a go at M57 as its one of my favourite deep sky objects. Again a single exposure with my 16" standing on the EQ Platform, ISO 1600 5 seconds. The good thing is it's obviously the ring nebula, but the longer exposure shows up the tracking and or vibration issue I have with the dob on the platform. I had to increase the brightness a stop when processing because it was dimmer on the Pc screen than the camera. I focussed quite well on vega (eventually), but not sure if it moved a touch as I pushed the dob to M57. Anyway, here it is.

[Coco]

Well done, I like these alternative images

[Stu]

That's pretty impressive!

[faulksy]

pretty good that richard, you will be selling up soon and getting a frac and eq

[Scooot]

pretty good that richard, you will be selling up soon and getting a frac and eq

No, too time consuming to do it properly and I'm not sure I'd get the hang of it anyway . The usual images I see on here are amazing and I admire the patience of everyone to get the last bit of quality out of their images.

I might get something like the skywatcher star adventurer but i'd have to do something about the light pollution showing up on the longer exposures.

[triton1]

Who say,s you can,t image with a dob.Well done.

[faulksy]

very impressive though richard, and hats of to the imagers

[Scooot]

Cheers Mike and all, what to try next I wonder

[Stu]

Cheers Mike and all, what to try next I wonder

M13 surely [emoji3]

[Scooot]

M13 surely [emoji3]

I did have a quick snap of that, tried 10s and I started to get the horrible light pollution glow. I think the battery was going on the platform as well, but I'll have another go at it. Might need a bigger dob to speed up the shutter speed. :)

[faulksy]

M27 :-)

[Scooot]

Got a good one of the cats eye, will post it later

[Martin Meredith]

Very interesting -- would love to see more. I've often wondered how good an equatorial platform would be for this style of observing. Which platform are you using or is home-built? What's the focal length of the Sumerian?

If tracking does turn out to be the limiting factor you might consider using even shorter exposures and live stacking?

cheers

Martin 

[Scooot]

Very interesting -- would love to see more. I've often wondered how good an equatorial platform would be for this style of observing. Which platform are you using or is home-built? What's the focal length of the Sumerian?

If tracking does turn out to be the limiting factor you might consider using even shorter exposures and live stacking?

cheers

Martin 

Its one from Equatorial Platforms UK. Scope focal length is f4.5. Any other 16" probably wouldn't fit on it. The platform isn't an ideal set up for imaging but its possible to get some reasonable pics of some things. Once I go above a couple of seconds the tracking becomes more of an issue.

To be more accurate I'd need to spend a lot longer aligning it accurately North, setting the latitude more precisely, and drift aligning for the speed which would have to be done by feel.

The other issue is for fainter objects like the Cats Eye I can't see them at all through the camera. So I have to focus on something else, in this case Vega. Then I have to find it without being able to see it, which relies on the accuracy of my Nexus Push To set up. It doesn't help that the Nexus Push To isn't so accurate when its on the platform. So its a bit of a challenge to say the least but I've had a lot of fun trying. The Cats Eye is a lot further away from Vega than M57 so I was quite pleased to find it let alone image it, and the tracking looks pretty good as well so I'm quite pleased with it.