What could I realistically achieve with this?

[stephec]

I've got a 150mm F5 reflector, and my son has a DSLR, I'll not be adding any more equipment as I like observing, but I'm just wondering if there's anything I can do with what I have available as regards imaging? 

[newbie alert]

What mount are you using

[Stickey]

In principle you could achieve some decent AP,  the Orion nebula springs to mind at this time of the years. But as the previous responder implied, it depends on your mount. 

AP needs a tracking mount . With a focal length of 750mm, the least bit of relative movement of the stars across the sensor will cause star trailing and blur the image.

On the plus side, once you have a tracking mount,  you can also capture nice wide field images just using the camera and normal lenses. 

 

[rickwayne]

That is certainly true for deep-sky objects -- by the rules of thumb for star trailing, you could get maybe half-second exposures at best unless your mount tracks. For many dim deep-sky objects, that's just not anywhere near reasonable, we tend to talk in terms of hours of integration time and so you'd be looking at thousands and thousands of sub-exposures to stack.

Orion is a bit of a special case -- so bright that it breaks the rules. I got this with a grand total of 12 minutes, admittedly from Bortle 1 skies.

You could certainly image the Moon very nicely. 750mm is a tad short for planetary work but with a Barlow or two you could make it happen. The standard technique for those brighter objects is to take video (FireCapture is the standard, dunno if it would work with your camera) and then use stacking software that pulls out the best bits of the best frames and stacks them for noise reduction. AutoStakkert! is the leader there. Finally, you sharpen the daylights out of the result. I've gotten more-or-less acceptable results out of Photoshop, but Registax is what the cool kids use.

[stephec]

Thanks everyone, forgot to mention it's on an EQ3-2 mount, no tracking though. 

[Clarkey]

You could by a T-ring and a motor for the RA axis and this would give you a tracking mount you can put a DSLR on. You would probably be limited to relatively short subs and coma would be an issue away from the centre of the image. Another option would be to put the camera directly onto the mount with the RA motor and do some wide field images with your existing lenses.  Certainly worth a try.