Back to basics

[david_taurus83]

Long story short, I've sold nearly everything astro wise but retained my CEM25P, Canon 6D and ive bought a Canon 135mm F2 lens. I was going to go for the Samyang 135 but they are rare second hand and a good example of the Canon 135 came up on ebay for around the same price as a new Samyang. Ive been eager to try it out but I've been waiting on a clip filter for the 6D. I decided to test it out last night regardless. I have to say, it was very refreshing to work with such a simple setup. No laptops, no guiding, just the camera on the mount. The 6D at 135mm is around 10" per pixel and the max PE of my CEM25P is around 17" over 10 minutes so no problems with tracking errors. I done a 1 star alignment on Vega and also used it to focus the lens, I only done this once for the night. Slewed to NGC7000 for a few test shots and fired away. I expected the previews to be washed out all white due to my light pollution but even at 30s ISO1600 at F3.5 the histogram was only just above half way! I setup Magic Lantern on the camera to snap 120 x 30s shots and left it to its own devices. No peering at a laptop screen every 10 seconds. No over analysis of every spike on a PHD graph! Went back out occasionally to check on things but no drama to report. After an hour and a bit the sequence finished so i took some flats. I have to admit, I missed the laptop here as Av flats rarely work for me but I set the exposure value to +3 and took 20 or so anyway. No darks as couldn't be ar$ed! Threw it all into Pixinsight to preprocess and then had a mess about in Photoshop. A mess about is an accurate description as I haven't a clue what I'm doing in there. I'm more surprised I managed to get anything decent considering I took this with no LP filter.

Overall, a very simple and relaxed session was had, and a nice carefree faff about in Photoshop. I could get used to this hobby...

[geordie85]

The past couple of nights have been clear but instead of setting up the full rig, I've just taken my DSLR, a couple of lenses and a static tripod out to capture comet neowise and I've had a great time. 

Sometimes the pursuit of better images can make us forget the beauty and simplicity of this hobby. 

[JamesF]

30 minutes ago, geordie85 said:

The past couple of nights have been clear but instead of setting up the full rig, I've just taken my DSLR, a couple of lenses and a static tripod out to capture comet neowise and I've had a great time.

Same here (last night, at least).  I just can't see that part of the sky from my observatory so decided I'd set up somewhere else with much simpler kit.  Took me a while to remember how it all worked, but got there in the end

James