First light with Starlight Live through my 70ED Refractor

[AstroAdam]

Hi All,

These are a few images taken during a live session tonight with the wonderful 'Starlight Live' with a lodestar (original mono, not X2), through my Ikharos 70ED f/6 refractor on an iOptron Minitower II Alt-Az mount.  I'd never used this refractor with SL before, and I was absolutely blown away at the live images I got, especially of M42 (along with M43 and the Running Man).   Descriptions on image captions.  

I'll definitely be using this little 70 along with the Lodestar a lot more often! That combination coupled with the Minitower II is a fantastic 'grab and go' EAA setup

[orion25]

Nice work! M42 is absolutely stunning!

Clear skies,

Reggie

[Astrojedi]

Fantastic results... That's what EAA is all about...

[Astrojedi]

What focal length were these shot at? 70ed at f/6 implies ~420mm but these look like 200mm or lower.

[AstroAdam]

What focal length were these shot at? 70ed at f/6 implies ~420mm but these look like 200mm or lower.

Doh! You spotted my deliberate mistake . In my 1:30am daze, I forgot to mention the reducer in my chain!!

0.5x reducer makes it more like f/3 like you said.

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[DoctorD]

Fantastic work - I have a similar set up and use it on a Skywatcher AZ for my camping set up.

Works well with a Ha filter too.

Clear Skies

Paul

[Martin Meredith]

Superb results with such short subs. We don't often see images with such a FOV in EAA -- the framing is great. BTW What are your skies like?

Martin

[AstroAdam]

Superb results with such short subs. We don't often see images with such a FOV in EAA -- the framing is great. BTW What are your skies like?

Martin

Thanks Martin - I'm very pleased with them!

Skies aren't marvellous.  This is what I'd call a 'darkish' site.  It's about 3 miles outside the city, but still a reasonable amount of LP, especially from a local farm's floodlights, about a mile away.  I can see the Milky Way - lets put it like that.   I can, see a lot more here than I can at home (though to be fair - my home skies aren't too bad for the middle of a city).    I've never really tried the smaller scope for EAA before - really nice to find out it produces such good results, and can't wait to do some more...

[AstroAdam]

Fantastic work - I have a similar set up and use it on a Skywatcher AZ for my camping set up.

Works well with a Ha filter too.

Clear Skies

Paul

Have an Ha filter to test it with.  That'll be in the next session I think

[laudropb]

Very nice set of images. Well done.

[RobertI]

Very nice results, I particularly like the M81/82 combo.

[Paul81]

Wow! Amazing captures! This looks to be a great setup for EAA and a great focal length for framing objects nicely - its nice to see them amongst the surrounding stars.

Looking forward to seeing the results of your next session! The Ha filter should work nicely in that setup.

[HiloDon]

Excellent results! I don't know how I missed this thread yesterday. No significant star bloat and nice wide field view. Did you use any filters?

Don

[AstroAdam]

Cheers all . The only filter used was the normal IR cut filter to avoid the bloat.

As for the field of view, I'd never used the small frac for EAA until this session. I think there's a tendency to go for smaller things with EAA due to chip sizes and the magnifications at bigger apertures. However I'd not seen as much wider field stuff very often and wondered why. To be honest I thought it would be down to the fact that it wouldn't lend itself very well to capturing wider fields, but I was a bit wrong there! I think that, especially during the winter, the 70ed is now going to be my primary EAA scope. It's so small and easy to transport when coupled with the iOptron minitower II, and at f3 with the reducer, the results so good.

Obviously in Galaxy/glob season it won't be quite as good, but I have the 8" newt on an heq5 for those times .

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[nytecam]

Very impresive Adam :-)

Nyte