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I need some guidance


Trucker360

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I am once again coming to you guys for help. I'm going to do my best to explain.

 I've been in this hobby since 3 months before the Saturn Jupiter conjunction. Granted I was waiting on back order, until January ish. I work stupid hours, so I'm not out every night. And apparently clouds like weekends. 

I have an Orion 130 st sitting on a sirius pro az/eq-g. 
I also have a Canon xsi full spectrum modded (because Orion and h alpha). Lenses include 18-300mm (I have 3 lenses lowest being like 18 and highest being a 75-300mm. 

The last piece of hardware besides various accessories, is a neximage 5. But I don't have a laptop yet. (I find one on ebay for about 175$ max today and I might just have it ordered soon) suggestions on things needed for a laptop. 

I've had so much trouble with the mount. Well, that's now over. I had a new friend over last night, and he fixed it. Revert to factory and magically most my problems are fixed. 

Along the way of start to today, the path I've wanted to go down has become a half ass game trail. I need some guidance to find my way again. 

Last night I had a t ring adapter with extension, on my eyepiece. Absurdly long, heavy with no focuser lock. Let's not forget, extremely frustrating. 

My friend said I can run that neximage 5 for solar system, and dso. But, idk how it'll work for dso. I'm also (i swear) just looking and found ZWO ASI120MC Super Speed Color CMOS Telescope Camera (copy paste lol) 

So, now what? Use the neximage 5 for everything? Put the camera and lens on the scope ring? Keep the camera in case I ever get a refractor. I'm so flipping lost. 

But my s21 does fantastic for 5min quickies first thing in the morning when I get to work. Lol.

Polish_20210820_044706947.jpg

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The question that came to mind reading your post is: have you ever done any astrophotography before just using a camera and lens?

If the answer to that is no then I'd say do that first, ideally with your wide angle lens because it's easier, and don't worry about using your telescope or trying to do planetary photography just yet. Astrophotography is a lot more complex than normal photography and when you're starting out it's best to make things as simple as possible while you get used to techniques and workflow. There's a lot more to think about when you introduce a telescope into the mix and a lot less margin for error which can be frustrating when you're starting out, especially if you try to do too many things at once.

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4 hours ago, Andrew_B said:

The question that came to mind reading your post is: have you ever done any astrophotography before just using a camera and lens?

If the answer to that is no then I'd say do that first, ideally with your wide angle lens because it's easier, and don't worry about using your telescope or trying to do planetary photography just yet. Astrophotography is a lot more complex than normal photography and when you're starting out it's best to make things as simple as possible while you get used to techniques and workflow. There's a lot more to think about when you introduce a telescope into the mix and a lot less margin for error which can be frustrating when you're starting out, especially if you try to do too many things at once.

I have used it and a tripod before. 

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9 hours ago, Trucker360 said:

I have used it and a tripod before. 

That's good. Presumably then you're familiar with things like image stacking and the post-processing to remove light pollution and bring out the details.

It sounds like you've done some photography with a static camera which can give great results with a wide angle lens. I think the next step would be to do some tracked exposures with the camera attached to the mount directly or piggybacking the telescope - one of the tube rings holding the scope might have a 1/4" bolt which you can fix your camera to. The other thing I'd recommend is photographing the Moon just using your DSLR at first either as single exposures or by taking a load of shots and having a go using software that selects the best images and stacks them automatically. You can do the same thing with the Neximage and it's more suited to lunar and planetary photography in many ways but the chip it uses is obviously much smaller than the one in your DSLR so its field of view is tiny and getting objects in the frame is more difficult so I'd start with the easy stuff first.

Start off with the wide angle and move to longer focal lengths as you get more experienced. You'll be able to see things like how well you've polar aligned your scope based on whether you have nice round stars or not and it's easier to do that with a wide angle first and then progress to your telescope which I think has a focal length of 650mm if I'm reading the right spec sheet. If you do struggle to get round stars and you've polar aligned as best you can then try reducing exposure time and just taking more images until you find something that works and doesn't show tracking errors.

The nice thing about using your DSLR is that you don't need it to be wired up to a laptop. If you don't already have one, an intervalometer is very useful for setting up imaging sessions - you set it to take maybe 120 exposures each 60s long and it will control the shutter firing automatically. A decent one is pretty cheap and you don't need to pay for brand name hardware. Some cameras also have an intervalometer function built it but it may be a bit limited if you want to take longer exposures - my Fuji lets me set exposure times up to 30s but any longer than that and I need to use a separate intervalometer.

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29 minutes ago, Andrew_B said:

That's good. Presumably then you're familiar with things like image stacking and the post-processing to remove light pollution and bring out the details.

It sounds like you've done some photography with a static camera which can give great results with a wide angle lens. I think the next step would be to do some tracked exposures with the camera attached to the mount directly or piggybacking the telescope - one of the tube rings holding the scope might have a 1/4" bolt which you can fix your camera to. The other thing I'd recommend is photographing the Moon just using your DSLR at first either as single exposures or by taking a load of shots and having a go using software that selects the best images and stacks them automatically. You can do the same thing with the Neximage and it's more suited to lunar and planetary photography in many ways but the chip it uses is obviously much smaller than the one in your DSLR so its field of view is tiny and getting objects in the frame is more difficult so I'd start with the easy stuff first.

Start off with the wide angle and move to longer focal lengths as you get more experienced. You'll be able to see things like how well you've polar aligned your scope based on whether you have nice round stars or not and it's easier to do that with a wide angle first and then progress to your telescope which I think has a focal length of 650mm if I'm reading the right spec sheet. If you do struggle to get round stars and you've polar aligned as best you can then try reducing exposure time and just taking more images until you find something that works and doesn't show tracking errors.

The nice thing about using your DSLR is that you don't need it to be wired up to a laptop. If you don't already have one, an intervalometer is very useful for setting up imaging sessions - you set it to take maybe 120 exposures each 60s long and it will control the shutter firing automatically. A decent one is pretty cheap and you don't need to pay for brand name hardware. Some cameras also have an intervalometer function built it but it may be a bit limited if you want to take longer exposures - my Fuji lets me set exposure times up to 30s but any longer than that and I need to use a separate intervalometer.

That's alot to unpack. 

So, I'm skipping to an eyepiece projection I took with scope and dslr. 

 

 

FB_IMG_1629661038873.jpg

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4 hours ago, Trucker360 said:

That's alot to unpack. 

So, I'm skipping to an eyepiece projection I took with scope and dslr. 

 

 

FB_IMG_1629661038873.jpg

Impressive! I always think of eyepiece projection as being a technique for lunar or planetary imaging and wouldn't have thought to try it on DSOs.

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