My First Foray into DSLR Widefield.

[Paul M]

So we've got a few days up at our Luxury Cumbrian Villa and the forecast for Sunday night was good. I've got a Mak 127 up here but no tracking mount. I decided to bring my Canon EOS 1200D along. I've used it with some success on my 250 PDS Newt but not really tried untracked widefiled. My day to day lens is a Tamron 18 to 200 zoom so that's what I used.

I brought my well used Windows Mini PC running APT to operate the camera. It took a while to get focussed, I couldn't get the auto focus routine to run because APT's "live view" insisted on refreshing in frames per second rather than seconds per frame... weird. So manual focus it was.

First was M42 (and M33, if you look hard) Wide open at 18mm, 19 x 20 sec. Stacked in ASTAP. It's junk, but represents my entire output since April

 

Then I "zoomed in" to about 5mm and pointed at the point between M45 (can't spell Pleiades) and Uranus. 6 x 10 sec. Even worse than M32, the coma in this lens is awful as you will see. But there it is, in all its glory. Uranus. With a little imagination you can see some surface detail and a few moons..

 

 

You too can produce images like this, you'd be surprised how little skill this required...