RayGil

Canon 350D ISO 1600 - 20sec Exposure Walney Island, Cumbria Ray

I'm in the UK, Cumbria - N/West Coast

That's very profound Isabella :-)

Hello John. Yes light pollution is a real pain, but bear in mind it's spring/summer the sky does not get really dark, when I'm imaging I have to start at 00:00 to allow long exposures and end about 02:30 after that the sky tends to lighten. The larger aperture does help. I image with my 120mm refractor and visual with my 200mm reflector, M51 under dark skies is very good, but still a struggle in the 200mm, can you travel? I have to! I live in a town and the only thing I can image from here is the Moon. To view or image DSO's I have to go to my dark sky site. In autumn things will improve for you darker skies and crisper seeing conditions. Don't give up! Try M13 the Great globular cluster in Hercules and M57 the smoke ring in Lyra, your larger aperture should bring out the detail. Ray

Hello Pat & Isabelle. Thanks for the comments, I will look at adding bias sub's thanks for the info, up to now it has been a work in progress, and a lot of trial and error, I have to travel to my dark site for photography, so it means setting everything up from scratch each night. At present I'm just allowing the mount to guide, have made lot's of adjustments and learnt various tricks to get decent tracking, to really improve I will be getting a autoglider at some stage, the Skywatcher stand alone one looks the best option for me, will allow less gear to be taken. The autoglider will allow longer exposures and bring out the detail of the DSO, but that's for the future, for now I will have to keep the images unguided and short exposures. I have only used the 120mm refractor for imaging, being wide-field it's easier to track, my 200p suffers from star trails in the images, but this is where the autoglider will help. Pat: good luck with the 250mm reflector I hope you get one! Ray

Thanks again Isabelle I have some DSO's on my blog and my messier list if your interested: Ray's Astro-Photography Site It's an ongoing project, but keeps me busy :-)

Thanks Isabelle, it's difficult to capture being unguided but it was certainly worth a try!

Inverted Image:

Birkrigg, Ulverston Cumbria 3rd June 2011 Main Target tonight was M51 The Whirlpool galaxy and the recently discovered Supernova SN2011dh. Arrived at my main imaging site at aprox 22:25 arrived at Birkrigg, conditions were better than the previous night, only slight cloud drifting on the horizon. Set up the EQ5 and polar aligned, balanced the scope and fitted the canon 350D prime focus. Once 3 star alignment had been successful, I tried point it various test objects to make sure alignment was centred correctly. Because I had plenty of time, I did a star tracking test and made some very slight adjustments. At 23:44 I fitted the Bahtinov mask and did a focus test on Vega, then swung the scope over to M51 the Whirlpool galaxy and did a 30 second exposure, checked the image and zoomed in on the back of the camera to check for image trails, everything looked good, set the camera to ISO 1600 and 30 second exposures, and started imaging M51 at 23:47. I took 47 x 30 second exposures and then proceeded to take 20 blacks with the scope capped. I had great reservations on whether my equipment was capable of capturing Supernova SN2011dh, the SkyWatcher 120mm short tube refractor performed very well, and I think the supernova was at the limits of my tracking capabilities, but this will improve in the future when I finally get an auto-glider, but for now all my DSO images are unguided. at about 00:45 i noticed a cloud bank drifting across and it was large, so I had a choice of either sitting it out or packing up for the night, I decided that packing up was the best option, I had achieved my goal for the night, imaging M51. Ray Cumbrian Skies