SPA & FSC astronomy weekend.

[Muphrid]

My wife dragged me to this, as she's the really keen one on astronomy, but she didn't have to pull too hard, as I've got the bug also (but don't tell her!).

It was a great weekend at the Preston Montford Field Study Centre with Prof Ian Morrison and Robin Scagell as the course tutors and what a brilliant job they did. I would recommend anyone - no matter what level of competence - to go on this course.

After a day of grey skies, Friday night cleared and we managed some excellent observing. I decided to slap my dSLR onto my wife's Skywatcher 200 PDS on an REQ5 mount and attempt some imaging. The scope was not fully set up to Polaris, I simply pointed it north using a compass, so I got some start trailing, but I was truly amazed at the results I managed to obtain. Apart from some adjustment to the colour balance (I shot in RAW and the balance was set for cloudy) nothing else was done to Andromeda and Orion, but for Pleiades, I used a technique shown to me at the Peak Star Party this year, whereby I copied the image into a new layer, applied Gaussian blur, then blended the layers and adjusted the transparency to get the misty halo effect (cheating you might say, and I would agree with you!). The exposure for Andromeda was 30 secs with the ISO at 4000 (yes four thousand) on a Canon 7D, Orion, again on the 7D, was 10 secs with 4000 ISO, while the Pleiades was 10 secs with ISO 4000 on a Canon 5D Mkll.

Anyway, these are the images:

[kharga]

Great pictures Muphrid! Looks like you had some good skies!

[Stargazer51N]

Like the pictures Muphrid.

I've been on a couple of the SPA weekends at Preston Montford in the past and would also thoroughly recommend them. Robin, Ian and the other presenters were all very interesting and down to earth. In 2008 we had a great talk on imaging by Peter Shah.

Here's a link to a picture from the 2007 course featuring me at the Bresser Messier N150 I share with my brother (who's in the foreground to the left of the scope)

Class of '07

Great to here you've caught the bug.