Any Idea ?

[Moon monkey]

Hi folks, please bear in mind I’m a complete novice at this

Last night was the first clear night for weeks, so I set my scope up early and then left it in the back garden. After what seemed like hours (I think it was) it got dark, so I set forth ant polar aligned my mount, and then did a star alignment. I’m getting much better at this, for a test I then told my scope to go to Saturn…. Bull’s-eye got it first time, after looking at Saturn for an hour with different lenses, I asked the scope to go to the ring nebular…… Bull’s-eye, right in the middle of my view.

Anyway I spent the night looking at various targets with varying success, It was a great session.

At the end of the night I decided to just scoot about the sky whilst looking through the eye piece to see what I could find ….. I was using the hand controller with the slew rate on high… whilst I was doing this I came across what I presume was a globular cluster, it was very vivid and I couldn’t miss it.

So I decided to take a snap with my DSLR … when I went back through the pics this morning on the computer I was a little surprised as there seems to be 2 clusters ….. Any Ideas ???

If I have captured a load of old rubbish please forgive me … I know not what I do

I know you are going to ask me what part of the sky it was in….. but ummmm I have no idea lol

All the best Monkey

084.jpg (137.3 KB)

[virtualpilot45]

The issue is focus. Try

a.) Setting the DSLR's focus to Infinity (∞)

b.)You just need to adjust your telescope's focus, the DSLR focuses at a different distance than the eye, so use the live view or take several pictures with different focus. The second 'cluster' is just a badly focused star, because of the large hole in the middle, caused by the secondary mirror obstructing the primary mirror. This is completely eliminated if the focus is changed.

Hope I helped

[Moon monkey]

I did wonder about that as i couldn’t see the second cluster with my eye .... but the other cluster was definitely there I could see it through the scope