First light...at last!!

[Hootsitabernacle]

 ]well a good 4 months after I got my Celestron 6se I managed to get it outside....last night was a wonderful clear night..only marred by the moon washing out most of it! I managed to see M3, M5, M13 and NGC6633 and took a few pics of the moon with my DSLR..however when I tried to take pics of the various clusters it just came up as black....whay would that be? is it a focus issue?

[VigdisVZ]

Good lunar pics!

You need to increase exposure lengths to many seconds to catch starlight. Focus should be about the same as the moon. And if your mount isnt tracking perfectly they will bounce around in the FOV and spread the light to where it wont be visible.

This is why deep sky photo is so expensive, you need an EQ-mount that solidly tracks the sky without field rotation in order to give the sensor time to collect the data.

You could try catching M31 and M45 and M42 to name a few with short (say 5 seconds give or take) with high ISO. You might get signal, but its unlikely that the setup will yield anything solid, as neither mount and scope is well suited for catching DSOs.