Capturing M8/M20 Lagoon/Triffid with barn door and 500mm lens?

[mikehab]

Hi all,

I'm planning a trip to a very dark site in the middle of France later this year but Stellarium is telling me that there's not much going on in the way of planets at that time of year - Mars and Saturn will be too low in the sky by the time it gets dark.  Hence I'm thinking there's no point in lugging the scope & mount and that I'll maybe try my hand at some budget widefield (milkyway) and DSO imaging instead.   I'm planning on taking a decent tripod and my homemade barn-door tracker, and just using my EOS 60D DSLR with various lenses attached.

For widefield I'll use the standard 18-55mm kit lens, but for some DSOs I'm thinking of taking either a Samyang 500mm f/6.3 mirror lens, or a Celestron Travelscope 70 (400mm f/5.7) attached to the DSLR.  According to Stellarium (again) it looks like the Lagoon & Triffid nebulas are around Mag 5.8/6.0 - so they seem like good targets, and when I plug in the details of the EOS 60D sensor and either the 400mm or 500mm lens then it looks like M8 and M20 will fit nicely into the frame.

My question(s)....

• Is it possible to take reasonable images of M8/M20 using such a simple budget setup or am I wasting my time? 
• Do you need any special filters in order to capture detail of nebulas like M8/M20?
• Will I be able to track well enough with a simple barn-door tracker for (say) 30sec exposures @ISO1600 with a 400mm or 500mm lens or would I be limited to shorter (15s) exposures?

Any thoughts/help/advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

[nmoushon]

You should be able to pick either of those targets up just fine with either setup. Only thing is to make sure you wil have a flat field or not because if you dont them you wont be able to fit both targets in the same FoV due to the need of cropping. They both are bright objects so you'll have no problems getting them to show even with shorter exposures.

[mikehab]

You should be able to pick either of those targets up just fine with either setup. Only thing is to make sure you wil have a flat field or not because if you dont them you wont be able to fit both targets in the same FoV due to the need of cropping. They both are bright objects so you'll have no problems getting them to show even with shorter exposures.

Great - sounds encouraging ... thanks.