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Do I need a Focal Reducer?

MIDIManNI

By MIDIManNI
in Getting Started With Imaging

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MIDIManNI

MIDIManNI

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Peter
 
I take it you are refering to the Orion ED80 as opposed to the SkyWatcher Evostar 80ED?
 
I was looking at a Vixen ED 81S APO Refractor as it was recommended to me by a friend who has one! Pricey but on a decent mount would be very good.

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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I always think that the best way to approach deep sky imaging is from scratch. It's easy to spend a lot of money trying to cobble things together only to find that you fail anyway. (That is, of course, based on personal misadventure in the early days!) If you build from the mount up, and keep F ratios fast and focal lengths short, you are far more likely to succeed and enjoy yourself.

Olly

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cjdawson

cjdawson

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I agree with Olly, that that I don't think there's a real shortcut to getting great DSO photos.  There are alot of things that need to fall into place in order for it to work - I found that this is half the fun.

Starting from scratch is what I did.  Got the best advice that I could for a scope, and talked through all the options.  At the time, I settled on my mount and OTA.  Which initially I used for visual observing, then over time upgraded to for astrophotography.

My path, was something like this....

Meade LX-90 in Alt-Az mode, with 2*Barlow, 25mm, 16mm and 40mm eyepieces.

Added 17Ah battery after "motor unit failure" from internal c-cells.  Never used internal batteries again.

Added Flexi-Dew Shield

Added Logitech QuickCam pro to take movies for stacking - moon (mosaic making), Saturn and Jupiter astrophotos became possible.

Added Cosina SLR (35mm slide film) to try my hand at prime focus.  Attempted M42 - turned out terrible, but the 10 minute exposure showed what I needed to learn next.

Purchased Skywatcher ST80 and dual rail mount to that I could mount it as a guide scope.

Bought a laptop, K3CCDTools, Philips Tucam Pro II and KitsRUs 102 to use as an autoguider.

Added Meade #909 APM (Accessory Port Module, no longer available for purchase)

This allowed me to auto guide me images, so tried again on M42 and managed to get a couple of good shots....

But, this caused a problem that I kept fighting for years.  The laptops battery didn't last long enough.   So I tried to run it off the battery using a 12v laptop power supply.  This failed as they were very tempremental about the input voltage.   Also kept flattening my 17Ah battery, so I upgraded to a 70Ah leisure battery, but still had a problem with the input voltage.  Tried using an inverter, but again that didn't work, turned out that the problem was the PSU for the laptop, so I replaced that with a generic one.  Which worked.   However, this wasn't an easy problem as when I was at home, I powered my setup from a workbench power supply and everything worked fine,  it wasn't until I went on a trip to a dark sky that the power problems became apparent, in the end this took about 10 years! to figure out completely and finally solve.  But it still wasn't ideal.

Made a dew heater for my main scope

Upgraded the camera to a Canon 30D

Started using SkyMap Pro 10 to control my scope.

Next found I had a problem getting great focus - so purchased a batinov mask.  (X marks the spot, so is much better now)

Got frustrated with the laptop issue, and so decided to splash out on an alternative....

Having already purchased an iPad.

Bought a SkyFi, and SkySafari Pro to replace SkyMap Pro.  (Sky Safari works great, especially for outreach, it's good to say I want to point the scope at this object, so I press here, here and here then they get to see the scope move "wirelessly" no bad for a 15 year old piece of kit ;-)

Bought a SkyWatcher SynGuider II to replace the autoguide setup that I was using before.

And hey presto, the power problems that I was having because of the laptop are gone. 

Added a second dew heater element for my Guidescope.  (Found this was needed after a 4 hour session of photography on M57.  Had completed the subs and was taking the dark frames when I saw the guide star dissapear from the SynGuider. Looked at the optics and smiled as I saw the Dew.  (Was already making the heater, so wasn't a big deal)

I've still got to calibrate the SynGuider so that I can easily find the suitable guide stars, this is a work in progress.

But overall, this journey has taught me a lot about the complexities of astrophotography.   It's also great that once in a while the scope does reward me with an image that is fantastic.  The session that I just mentioned on M57 gave me a set of images to process, and after processing found that I had the ring, the nebulosity inside the ring and the central star too.  Really pleased with how that turned out, and with this setup, it's the starting point.

Once I get the synguider working properly on feint guide stars, it should be more a case of having imagine sessions rather than setup debugging sessions.

The journey goes on.

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MIDIManNI

MIDIManNI

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Hi all...

Many thanks for the very detailed and much appreciated feedback...

I was told from the start that Stargazing would have a steep learning curve and that AstroImaging was even worse but Oh boy is it fun!!

Again thanks for the replies.

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