_Rachael_

Hope your session goes/went well!

Thanks, good advice on the exposures!

Here's my first attempt at Pleiades with pretty much beginners kit that isn't best suited to astrophotography : ) It's nowhere near as good as other images on here but I'm happy with it! Shot on my EQ3/2 Pro mount. I did polar align properly but there is no second camera for tracking - just using the motors. It was tricky balancing my camera and lens on the mount but managed it with a 1/2 Kg weight on the counterweight shaft and mounting my DSLR on top of the front empty tube ring and then pulling the dovetail bar as far back as it would go so the empty tube ring overhung behind it and length of bar acted as a counterweight to the camera and lens on the front tube ring... Anyway it all worked and I was getting three minutes untracked no problems. This was only a test run to see if it worked so it is REALLY noisy as I only took 19 x 90 second light frames of Pleiades and five dark (so just under 30 minutes of data). Shot on my Canon EFS 55-250mm at 250mm at ISO 1600, used the Camera Connect and Control app on my smartphone to remotely get the focus as fine as possible. Stacked in Deep Sky Stacker and RGB Levels stretched in Photoshop and a noise reduction filter put on in Lightroom. Anyway this is a REALLY REALLY NOISY image but I'm happy with it given the kit and limited data. Just trying to see what I can get from the kit I have before forking out on an astro focussed lens and better mount. Will try and do a longer run next time, with longer exposures and more darks and biases to see if I can get any more detail and keep the noise down.

Thanks for the compliments 👍 I'm not sure what counts as eyepiece projection? I had my 8-24mm zoom eyepiece directly in the focuser and had a T adapter on the thread of that with my DSLR joining there, in the same way I'd attach my camera to a Barlow. I don't know if that's eyepiece projection but it seems to work?

There weren't many clear nights over the past 6 weeks so these images come from about two or three nights. It's my first Mars season. I'm shooting with a Skywatcher 150pl on an EQ3 Pro. I don't have a planetary camera so just using my EOS 700D attached to a cheap as chips 8-24mm zoom lens and varying the zoom for the seeing. Used BackyardEos then processed in Pipp, AS3! and did the layering in Photoshop instead of Registax. Anyway, I was quite happy for my first Mars efforts but really need one of those electric focuser things. Also, should the pole be at the top or bottom in Mars photos?

Great shot! That's really impressive!!! I've been thinking of having a go of getting the ISS on my Skywatcher 150pl telescope and maybe using the video on my S10e smartphone - how difficult is this? I imagine the ISS is moving at a fair clip compared to the background stars? I've got tracking on my EQ mount but no idea what speed I'd use for the ISS - if you can track it manually with the slow motion controls I'd definitely give it a shot. I' definitely be interested to see a link to the pre-processing frames. [edit: I'm dumb and didn't spot the video link - the YouTube images are really good!)

Hi My first post on this forum! Thought I'd share my first attempts with afocal photography through my Samsung S10e. The Saturn and Jupiter were taken about 10/11 August in not too great seeing. I was using my old Skywatcher 150PL (with a very recently hand cleaned mirror and freshly collimated) on my EQ3 Pro mount with the my smartphone mounted to my 6mm eyepiece with one of these very cheap holders (it's fine once you get the position sorted) https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164283079545?ul_noapp=true I was more than impressed with what was produced from short video runs in not great seeing (especially the Saturn pic). Will definitely be doing some more test runs when there is actually a clear night, especially now that I've worked out I can wirelessly control my smartphone camera from my PC using Samsung Flow (Samsung Dex works as well) so I can zoom the camera in, set the resolution and kick it up at 60 frames per second and view it all on my PC screen without touching the phone and causing loads of shake (which is what happened with these and I had to cut the first and last 10 secs off each video). Videos processed in PiPP and images stacked in Autostakkert and wavelets in Registax. The images are much less noisy than my old Philips Toucam! (Though I've got much better Jupiters out of that before) Also included a Neowise shot from July (it's in the middle of the screen if you squint). It was shot using a selfie cam tripod! (With Pro Mode on the camera) and some test widefield shots I tried in Feb, again using Pro Mode on the camera where you can really tweak the settings. It's really good to see this forum and I think I'm definitely going to try a bit more smartphone astrophotography to see how far I can push my equipment. _Rachael_