North American and Pelican Nebulae through a Nikon 70-300mm zoom lens

[Laurin Dave]

As the moon was about I thought I'd do a bit of an experiment Friday and Saturday to see how usable a Nikon 70-300 mm zoom was attached to a ZWO ASI1600mm. Also involved were a ZWO EFW an Astrodon 5nm Ha filter, an AltairAstro 60mm guidescope, a ZWO ASI120 and a Skywatcher AZEQ-6.  A big lump of wood,  some screws, guidescope rings and a dovetail bar later I was ready to go.  Friday night I used the lens at 70mm and got 26x300s on the Deneb area and Saturday I got 24x300s  at 200mm on the North American  and Pelican Nebulas.  I used SGpro, Eqmod and PHD2 to control things,  focus was somewhat fiddly and achieved using SGPro HFR measurement.   The results are below,  star shapes at the edges are a bit off, but nonetheless I'm rather pleased with the outcome. 

Thanks for looking

Dave