First light with Starlight Xpress H36 and TMB 115

[GordonH]

Hi All

I picked up my TMB 115 after Astrofest and managed to get out over the last couple of nights to try it out with the H36. I haven't posted the images here as I am struggling to reduce the size sufficiently for the upload limit. They are on my website www.imagingtheheavens.co.uk under star clusters and nebulae in the image gallery.

The images are The Cone nebula and cluster, The Jellyfish nebula and M45 Plieades star cluster. All the exposures are 30x4 minutes unbinned and unguided. I added some false colour using Noel's tools in Photoshop just to help bring out the detail. All of the images had to be cropped due to vignetting which is a problem that I can live with until I can source some suitable adapters. I used a broadband light poluution filter as I suffer from some light pollution where I live and there was a crescent moon fairly close to M45 when I shot that, seeing was pretty bad for both night as although there were no clouds there was some cold mist and plenty of sky glow. Although they are not up to the standard that I have seen on some of the posts they are a starting point and I am pretty pleased with the results.

Best regards and more clear skies to all

Gordon

PS I found a long winded way of reducing the size of the images for upload so here they are

[anthony]

Hi Gordon,

Nice images. looking like there's a lot of potential there.

Nice website too by the way, (I hadn't visited it before) and I must say that you have a cracking set up there!

Anthony

[MartinB]

You must be chuffed to have got the H36 into action. I shall be very interested to see how you get on with it. Should complement your SCT very well. I particularly liked the nebulosity you've captured in M45

[Viking]

Gordon,

While a lot of SGL imagers will use Photoshop to manipulate their images there is a good freebie on the following http://www.photofiltre.com/ Select Photofiltre 6.3.1 to download. Copy and paste your image into a new screen, then select image and then image size and follow the instructions.

John