Tohrazer

wow!! how did you do that? lol

i took a look at your images, id say they are MUCH better than my attempt! but thankyou all the same (your images are great by the way!)

i dont even know what a DSLR is! LRGB is meant to be good then? i struggled getting more than 1 colour to show, the reason i felt bad about posting is it i have seen people with AMAZING pictures with like £2000~ worth of gear, and then i produce that using a $100,000~ facility, so i felt like it was a failure thanks alot for the kind comments!

dont think i'll get the opportunity again during this module

10*30 sec exposures in R/G/B/Clear, 10 darks/flat/bias (10 flats for each filter) .... 17" Telescope (university observatory i was lucky enough to have access to for a night)

thanks! i stacked the exposures with maxim but my abilities with it are very basic, as for photoshop etc i am pretty clueless

great detail! well done

alright! thanks for the words of encouragement, here is the image:

edit: actually i decided its not good enough to share with people

thanks for the information, i didnt realise it was quite that expensive!, also Maxim looks very expensive (i have a temporary maxim licence because of my university course, imaging with the PIRATE telescope in mallorca)

hi! im currently looking at buying a telescope/mount/camera/software for imaging, i've seen some of the amazing pictures people on this website have captured and i want to give it a go myself what im basically asking is, what is a decent entry level setup, and how much is it going to cost me? i bought a large (12") dobsonian telescope a few years back, and i've found its simply too large to make use of as much as i want (also obviously its useless for imaging), i think 8" or so would suit me much better! kind regards,

an iphone

the moon, through my dobsonian, with my picture phone.. <--- says it all, but considering how crude that is for imaging, i was happy

wondering if someone can reccomend some dark skies in Syorks, i need somewhere not too far away where i can just set up for the night, the town i live in just has too much light pollution.

so my first go ever with a real telescope (12" skywatcher dob), which incidentally, i recieved the day previously (for Christmas) and i was gifted with some moderately/intermittantly clear skies! admittedly not knowing the sky hugely well, and the clouds not helping, i didnt see anything particularly amazing, or well i did, but not in the way you might imagine, we'll get to that later.. my first target was betelgeuse, simply to line up the finder with the primary properly - 15 minutes of fiddling around with it with the assistance of a friend later, we had it in the center of both scopes, great! so i swung it over to Orions belt and for awhile was trying to locate M42 above it (the whole upside down image thing is really throwing me, if you know a patch of the sky reasonably well especially) after realising my obvious error however, we managed to get it focused on M42, straight away we were able to see the 4 main stars of the trapezium, which i was quite happy with! although i was dissappointed by the lack of structure in the Nebula itself (it almost looks to have more structure in binoculars) at this point it clouded over very quickly, one moment it was completely clear, the next - clouds everywhere, it was like they spontaniously formed overhead, not to worry, some take out pizza and a drink later, we were back outside with clear skies, i swung it over to the pleiades and was happy with the view it gave of them, it can see a real lot of stars where my Binoculars only see 10 or so, infact, it seemed no matter where i pointed the darn thing, it saw alot of stars, great stuff! so then we decided to try and look at M31 or M33... at first we found cassiopeia and looked accross, then spent a good few minutes debating which triangle shape was actually the right triangulum constellation, after finally settling on the (right) one, we looked around for M33 in the finder scope and with binoculars, but were unable to get a 100% confirmed sighting of it, and couldnt get the primary on it, as i strained to point the finder scope in the right direction, my friend shouted something along the lines of "OH SHI- LOOK AT THAT" so following his hand pointing to the sky (not that it was necessary) i was greeted with the most amazing sight i have ever seen, a huge orange fireball skimming accross the atmosphere, easily visible with the naked eye, bright Orange (much more so than betelgeuse for example) and Brighter and larger than Venus, it didnt break up and dissappeared over the house, i can only imagine it bounced back off the atmosphere and back into space, id imagine it was more than a spec of dust considering the display it put on, very satisfying! i ran inside the house screaming at my dad to help me find my phone, locating it i ran outside and was able to get one quick shot of it, its small in the relatively low quality phone camera, without magnification, but even pointing the camera at sirius you see *nothing* to give you some idea how bright this thing was to even show. anyhows, shortly after... yep, you guessed it, it clouded over again, so we brought the scope in, and i noticed some banding that looked like a spider had walked allover it with butter, deciding it was ice/dew, i hairdryered it, and was relieved to see it dissappeared and reflected my face back at me perfectly thereafter thats my first observation report anyhows! hopefully i can get it out somewhere dim soon! thanks to my friend lee for helping out and in particular spotting the not overly inconspicuous fiery ball of fire. thanks for reading!