Ouroboros

That's a great image of a target that looks its best in wide field. The second image really zings. Well done! I bet a lot of us envy the Bortle class II. Something that is sadly becoming ever rarer in southern Britain at any rate.

OK. Yes, If I were to try and image M87 to bring out the jet I'd use my 8" SW Newtonian. I think too I might try a range of shorter exposure times than I usually do with my DSLR to avoid saturating the jet region with light from the M87 galaxy itself. It would make an interesting imaging exercise.

It is a very nice capture. I don't know what scope tooth_dr used, but the jet can be captured with quite a modest scope. I've posted this image before. It was captured with my ED80. I had set out to image the Markarian chain. It was only later on reading up about it that I realised that M87 has a jet. So I reprocessed that part of the image and found it is just about visible.

Good to see an imager using their imaging to go beyond 'just' producing a nice image; to do some astronomy in other words.

Excellent image. Interesting how the negative image brings it out more.

I can't see how that gets around the time paradox. Change the past in even the slightest (even invisible) degree will change the future from that point on.

Perhaps the many universes theory allows for time travel into the past without resulting in various forbidden paradoxes. It just wouldn't be travel back to our past, just a parallel past.

Well done. Excellent. Glad you got some help. It's the sort of thing that would probably go ok on your own but you never know. You could get nastily stung. You do realise that from now on your nickname will be Old Smokie .... or Sting possibly!

I thought we were talking film. ?

For all sorts of reasons I wish they'd move it back to summer rather than October. But if it must be October please steer clear of the new moon.

Would I be right in thinking that a modded DSLR is still one shot colour? In which case it's only fair to compare it with the prices of one shot colour CCDs/CMOS cameras of similar chip size. As already said, these will be more than the £600 budget allows. And going down the mono CCD/CMOS route is more expensive still given the additional costs of filter wheel, filters etc. I agree with the comment that DSLRs are a good entry to astrophotography, potentially for significantly less than £600. In fact they're so good I've never stopped using mine. Nor have I made the transition to CCD/CMOS. But then I'm an occassional imager who finds the essential simplicity, self containedness and reliability of a DSLR as one less thing to worry about when setting up and tearing down on each occassion. Mind you, having said all that, had I not owned a DSLR before starting astrophotography I would probably have spent £1500+ on a mono CMOS + filters system. I don't think there's much point trying to achieve that with a budget of £600. You either bite the bullet and spend a decent amount on a decent camera plus accessories, or go for a cheaper DSLR which will provide a hugely enjoyable learning experience and decent imaging for a fraction of the cost.

Yes, I've thought of that. I'm a bit reluctant to do that because I use all those storage holes at the back of the case for reducer and various connectors etc. Might be the only option though.

Very nice pics here. I particularly like the ones with the planes. Unusual.

I'd like to add an auto focuser to my Evostar 80ED. But I'm never convinced that any of the available commercial ones will enable me to put the telescope back in the aluminium carrying case for transportation. Anyone else met or better solved this question?

@tooth_dr is that with PixInsight? @TheMan that's a petty good image for Bortle Class 8/9. The colours are nice. Did you have to struggle to get the colour balance right against the colour cast provided by so much light pollution? That's been my problem when imaging under such conditions. I agree with the earlier comment that flats would help this image. Though of course it's recommended to take the flats at the time, you might just for the exercise try taking some flats even now and applying them. You might be lucky and it helps if dust bunnies haven't moved. Assuming you've disassembled your set up you'll have to put things back as close as possible to where they were when you took the data, including having the camera at focus. I've done this on occassion and been pleasantly surprised how well it works.

Personally I find the second is a better image. There appears to be more detail. To my taste there is too much red in the galaxy and the stars. But then I prefer under saturated colour in deep sky images. It's all very subjective.

That's a really nice image. I like the wider field views you get of M31 with a camera lens. I bet you've learnt a lot taking and processing that image.

I'm sorry to read of Keiron and his wife's passing. I only met Keiron on one occassion when I decided to take a detour off the M5 to visit the shop during one of my many journeys back and fourth between Cornwall and home. I spent a pleasant hour or so chatting with him and looking at the various scopes he had on display in the shop and about Astronomy in general. I will miss the newsletters too.

What a place to live. I am truly envious. Good luck with the pond. Ponds are a a constant source of interest. They're also a source of hard work. Unlike other parts of the garden they often need things doing to them. We made one about 18 years or so. We went for the wild life pond. There was a partially excavated hole in the ground already, so it didn't take much digging out. We laid old carpet down first, then a butyl sheet on top, then a six inch or so layer of poor soil, and rocks and stones around the outside. Added water and some plants and stood back and waited for wildlife to arrive. And boy, did it! Within a few days there were things like pond skaters. Newts, pond snails, dragon fly larvae, the occassional frog all arrived on their own with no help from us whatsoever within months. Remarkable.

Great idea. I'd love to know what ratio is 'good enough' too. Mine is 1:4.6 I get guiding of 1" RMS or better as long a s there's no wind. That seems to be just about acceptable for my set up on most frames. I did once try testing the guiding by putting the guide camera into the main scope just to see what was the best I could get. That improved guiding by about a factor of 2. So I could gain a bit by using a longer guide scope. Trouble is I'm using a Lodestar X2 guide scope, which has 8um pixels in a 9x50 finder scope. Just a note on the software interface. On iPad I can't see all of the calculated numbers like resolution. So for example I can see the resolution is 2 point something but not what the two digits are after the decimal point. Heres a pic.

OK. So the same size sensor as mine. You'll get a slightly larger image size than I get with my 450D attached to my Evostar ED80 which has a focal length of 600mm. So the full moon will look something like the lunar eclipse image I took below. M31 is about 3 times the apparent diameter of the moon and will be nicely framed if you place it on the diagonal of the frame. That should give you an idea of the image size you'll get.

Maybe you've said but what sort of DSLR have you got?

One way to think about it I suppose is that a telescope is really a modified microscope for looking at distant objects. An eyepiece is really a microscope. The purpose of the primary lens or mirror is to collect as much light as possible from the distant object and to focus and project an image of it at (or near) the focal plane for close inspection by the eyepiece (microscope). The size of the image formed by the primary lens or mirror is proportional to its focal length. The longer the focal length, the larger the image. With my Canon 450D DSLR attached to my 1000mm Newtonian telescope the full moon almost fills the short side of a full image. The same camera attached to 700mm telescope would provide an image in which the full moon was 0.7 times smaller. Just over half the size in other words. Of course the actual size of the full moon on the OP's DSLR will depend on the size of the sensor. But in approximate terms, even if it's a full frame DSLR, I would expect the OP's telescope to give an image of the moon about half (or slightly more) the size of the full image.

Yep. You got it!