Knight of Clear Skies

Here's my entry, the Moon and Venus taken with a 135mm lens and Ha filter. For added StuPoddity, I also used a Bahtinov mask

I believe you'll get even better results if you use a net curtain as a diffraction grating, helps bring out those subtle cloud patterns and on a good day you may get a hint of the canals.

Ah, but several iterations of a sharpening filter reveal a swarm of brightly coloured satellites, and if that isn't proof of something-or-other I don't know what is.

Not my image, but here's Jupiter taken with a Dob and 4k smartphone. From here on Reddit, the equipment and exposure details are a few posts down.

Amazing, I have no idea how you managed to capture the collision between Earth and Theia.

It's not an easy target with an unmodded camera but a member managed it the other day despite heavy light pollution. Here's my 2 minute effort on the Belt & Sword from a dark site: This is a single 2 minute sub with a quick process, 135mm lens at f3.5, modded Canon 1100D and taken on an EQ3-2 mount. The 150P is f5, so that would roughly double the exposure time, and the unmodded camera will let through about 1/3 of the Ha signal. As a ballpark figure you might be looking at perhaps 12-15 minutes to gather a similar amount of light. The signal-to-noise ratio would likely be lower though, as each exposure introduces a certain amount of read noise. the longer you can get the less noisy the final image will be. There is no need to wait 20 seconds between exposures to cool the camera, that just wastes valuable imaging time. When stacking in DSS I'd recommend selecting the Kappa-Sigma clip option, this does a great job of removing DSLR noise patterns when used with dithering. I rarely bother with darks myself, if the temperature profile doesn't match the lights they can introduce more noise, but I do take dark bias and flats. Hope that's some helps and good luck, there are some brighter targets you could try first. Also, if you have a lens you can put on the camera that might be an easier place to start, polar alignment and tracking are much more forgiving at short focal lengths.

Good to hear you found it helpful and good luck with the Star Adventurer.

Here's my rig tracking Auriga with a 135mm lens.

Thanks for reminding me about it, here's a version with a better colour balance: (135mm lens, each frame is a 2 minute sub so it shows the movement of Jacques over about 50 minutes.)

By all means, go ahead. Thanks, I really must go back to it sometime and fix the colour balance. I hit comet Jacques by accident on that occasion but since then I've kept an eye on the brighter comets for imaging opportunities on Heavens Above.

Here's a couple of recently reprocessed images taken from my EQ3. Comet Catalina passing close to M101 back in January, 14 minutes with a 135mm lens at f3.4. This was taken up in light-polluted Hertfordshire, I've just used Gradient Xterminator on it to sort out the background and vignetting. Can just make out the ion trail pointing to the left. A wide shot of the Hyades, Pleiades, California nebula and Alpha Persei cluster, taken with an old 24mm lens.

This was my first proper run with my EQ3, 30 minutes on the Heart & Soul with a 135mm Super-Takumar lens. Annoyingly I haven't managed to better the star colours since then, wish I knew what I did to get them.

Thanks very much for this. I've downloaded the PDFs for a couple constellations and it will be very useful for exploring what I've captured in my Virgo Cluster image.

A real shame there aren't more replies to this thread. I've seen some spectacular images here in the past year and it would be great to see them collected together.

Great to see all these fantastic images together. Just three for me. Downtown Cygnus with a closer view of the NA & Pelican Nebulae. A wide view of the Pleiades. And this crop of a 200mm lens shot of Andromeda.

Here's a quick tour of Cygnus shot with kit, 50mm and 200mm lenses.

Hope the new lens works out well, would be interested to hear how it performs. Regarding the filters I'd suggest testing it out first - if you find you need to stop it down anyway you could buy the cheaper set.

See my posts above, I can't say whether this is worthwhile or not. We need some kind of zoom filter suitable for all apertures, clearly a gap in the market there.

Yes, that was what i was proposing in post #17. You'd need to use a step-down ring to attach the a 2" filter.

If you're buying new then there are filters suitable for shooting at fast focal ratios available these days, such as these Baaders.

f3.9 I think, which is still fairly quick. Thought I'd mention it as an option in case it was useful, most narrowband filters have issues at very fast focal ratios due to the steep light cone I believe. I don't know if the OP intends to use existing filters, is looking to buy new ones or is just shooting RGB. Yes. Switching a filter only takes a moment but the lens hood gets in the way, and I find the one on my lens quite stiff and a pain to remove.