My second image - which should not work at all ...

[jnb]

So I'm amazed it showed anything

This is through a 102mm F10 achro, digiscoped through an 8mm eyepiece and photographed with a canon ixus compact left to do all it's own settings.

This was also photographed on a near full moon (~80%ish) with some slightly dodgy seeing. Now at first glance you might think there is nothing in that picture but that faint smudge at the bottom is the Ring Nebula (I think). I'm amazed it got anything at all but I think some better equipment might help! At the very least something where I can set exposure.

[tingting44]

great at getting out there and actually using a scope! ive not now for ages dues to clouds or work

not sure if it is the ring neb, if it were i would expect to see stars before seeing the neb in the image?

what exposure is the above image?

here is what the image looks like with simply the levels slider adjusted to see what is there a bit better....

[jnb]

This is digiscoped so the field of view is very small (compared to the moon image I had it would suggest a field of view which is small enough that the absence of bright stars isn't surprising. Repeat images had the fuzzy in the same position. Stacking repeat images brought out some background stars. Which suggests that I might have been on target. Against that is that a I was trying to digiscope an object that was too faint to show in the camera I had to centre it visually, set motors running and then attach a bracket and camera without upsetting the alignment. So there's plenty of opportunity to muck it up there.

As for what the actual exposure and field of view would have been I have no idea as this is a camera which is too simple to tell me such things.

I am not entirely convinced that I hit the target but I definitely hit something that was a real artifact and not just a wisp of cloud. I think my next attempts will be prime focus with an SLR rather than trying to be silly and push compacts to do what they shouldn't be able to do.

Edit to add that comparing it to a lunar shot suggests that the field of view would be about 7' x 10' but that's assuming that I didn't change any settings between shots.

[jnb]

Too late to edit that last post but I meant to say that the image in that post is a stack of about 20 jpegs using the full image from the camera. So that image is probably about 10' across if I haven't changed anything, which is perfectly possible as I was using the cameras zoom when digiscoping the moon.

If that fuzzy, on the right in that stack, is the ring nebula then it should be about a quarter of the image width which would suggest that I have knocked the image off centre in attaching the camera