Lyra Optic 150mm f/8 - Imaging results

[iwatkins]

Hi All,

I bought the big frac for white light solar imaging, but also for pushing around the sky at night for observing. It does both of these things very well indeed (see here for WL rig and results: http://stargazerslounge.com/showthread.php?t=189131)

You do hear lots of people saying you must have an APO for imaging at night as an achromat has too much CA. So gave it a try on the moon last night. Setup was OTA on a SkyTee2 and Canon 7D DSLR at prime focus. No filters and nothing else in the imaging train. Focused by hand, tracked by hand. Seeing was still being churned a bit by cool down of the surrounding landscape, would estimate seeing was 2/5.

Exposure is 1/30 sec. WB 5200K.

Image 1 is full frame resized to fit forum. Image 2 and 3 are 100% crops. I really do think that the CA isn't at all bad but maybe I'm just relaxed about it. Majority of it could be removed using lens corrections in Photoshop or use of a semi-APO filter or similar.

What do you think? It's not something I'm likely to do very often anyway, just nice to know that you can.

Cheers

Ian

[nightfisher]

About time Ian, i have been waiting to see some lunar shots from this scope!

They are very good, i love the second image, but if you were to invert to monochrome the image would pop out just a tad more, but im happy to see a little false colour

[iwatkins]

Sorry Jules, would have done it quicker if it hadn't been for the awful weather last month

Yep, these are unprocessed except for size and crop.

I've another version I started with sharpening and just using the red channel for a mono output, much sharper. I'll post that when I next get on my PC.

Cheers

Ian

[iwatkins]

A processed image. Looks ok

Cheers

Ian