North Amerca Neb and Vintage lens

[mackiedlm]

First light with my newly modified EOS1100D (UV/IR Cut removed)

Tried it out with a vintage lens I've had for nearly 40 years. It was not new when i got it and has not been used in probably 25 years. Its a Pentacon 135mm f2.8 and I have to say its nice to be giving it a second life after all these years. And I'm not too disappointed in its performance.

I was a bit short on time on target as the clouds rolled it so only managed 20X120s @ ISO1600, darks and bias applied. Stars are a bit orange but I think with more lights and less aggressive processing i could reduce that a bit. I know diffraction spikes are not to everyone's liking but for me it rather adds to the vintage feel of the image. In the old film days i had a load of Cokin filters and one was specifically to put spikes on point highlights so it adds to the trip down memory lane!

Thoughts?

[Whistlin Bob]

Very nice. I've been playing with vintage lenses myself a bit this year- it's amazing what they can do!

[FaDG]

Nice shot, Vintage lenses offer a great value! You could add more lights on different nights and a modded camera will give you a lot more signal. 

Here is the same target acquired with a different vintage lens, but same focal length : Jupiter 135 f3.5 (the radioactive one, I fancy it could produce an image even when left in a closet! 🤣) on a modded Canon 600d. 

For this shot I have added a 2" IDAS V4 in front of the lens, to keep light pollution at bay. 

 

[happy-kat]

@mackiedlm that is a nice lens with great star shapes right to the corners, I see you stopped it down a bit, if you use a step down ring you would not get the refraction spikes.

[mackiedlm]

49 minutes ago, FaDG said:

Nice shot, Vintage lenses offer a great value! You could add more lights on different nights and a modded camera will give you a lot more signal. 

Here is the same target acquired with a different vintage lens, but same focal length : Jupiter 135 f3.5 (the radioactive one, I fancy it could produce an image even when left in a closet! 🤣) on a modded Canon 600d. 

For this shot I have added a 2" IDAS V4 in front of the lens, to keep light pollution at bay. 

 

Thats a lovely image, super colour. I have just got a UHC lens to see it i can cut down on LP a bit. I'm in whats classed a bortle 4 but there are sodium lights just outside my perimeter which throw things off a bit.

In the mean time, I went back to raw data and tried to get a bit more out of that image and got a bit more colour at the cost of some rather dodgy looking stars.

[FaDG]

Yes, that's better, IMO. 

You could keep one of you previous lights as reference so that next time you can point the camera with the same orientation and add more integration time. 

Then, if you use your UHC to cut through light pollution, the new image with more contrast could become your luminance layer, and the previous one (with unfiltered colour) be superimposed as RGB after coregistration. In this way you could benefit from higher contrast and SNR, AND keep natural looking colours.