Cassiopeia widefield - first light for AstroTrac

[x6gas]

I wanted to have something portable enough to take on holiday as airline hand-luggage and after much deliberation decided to go for an AstroTrac.

To keep costs down, this is mounted on an exisiting photo tripod (a bit cheap and cheerful for this purpose - more below) and using one of my DSLRs so the only additional outlay was for a ball mount to sit between the AstroTrac and the camera... I can easily fit the whole lot (AstroTrac, polar scope, DSLR body, 2 x lenses, batteries (camera and AstroTrac) and chargers, ball mount, netbook, cables etc) into a medium sized photography backpack... And it just about passed under the weight limit for carry-on!

I was hoping to have first light back at home but the usual WWW beat me (weather, work, wufe - actually not the latter as she is amazingly understanding) so finally had my first attempt here on Crete last night.

I'd forgotten how hard it is to achieve a tight focus using a DSLR lens, and I didn't nail it last night. Guess I'll have to bodge up some kind of Y-mask. Also, my cheap tripod isn't up to the task of the smooth, fine adjustments needed to polar align and to top it all, I had to remove and reattach the camera which I am sure knocked the polar alignment off more (by then the polar scope was inside and I didn't want to disturb the wife... she's great but there are limits...) So, the stars are trailed and not in perfect focus but despite that I am happy with this as a first result.

Also have some amp glow - which is not unexpected since it was still 20 Celcius but otherwise I think the Nikon D40 I used performs quite well (have a D40x too - but wanted the bigger pixels) though the cheap 18-55 kit lens I used shows its limitations, especially wide open. I think a faster wide angle lens would be great for a very widefield of the milky way...

This is 4 x120(ish) sec exposures @ ISO 800 stacked with very minimal processing in DSS - don't have any other image processing software loaded on the netbook. I suspect it will look very green, though it's OK on my screen.

I was slightly surprised at how difficult it is to make out the stars forming the constellation - lots going on and a very rich star field. I presume that's the double-double on the far left of the image and there are some other DSOs lurking in there too. Had to save the following as quite small files to upload via the hotel wifi so hope they are OK!

Overall I'm quite encouraged.

[x6gas]

Hoping this will look less green...