Help with M57

[robindurant]

I am new to Astro photography and could do with some advice. I have a Canon 350D and use it with my Celestron 8i. I have taken pics of M13 & Jupiter with some sucess and would now like to tackle M57 which is very faint at the moment when viewing it. Can anyone advise me as to the exposure time etc I should tryto obtain a goodi mage and the ISO rating using prime focus. I also have a Tele Extender which I have used with a 26mm EP on Jupiter but this seems to me too adventurous for using in deep space. Any advice will be most appreciated.

Robin

Celestrron 8iSD / Canon 350D/ MAC computer using Keiths Stacker

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Depends on what f ratio your 'scope is. For f/16 I did 3 minutes at 1600iso to get a useable (as in unstacked) image, you can go shorter if you want to stack them up later. The easist way is to go out, snap a few guessed exposures and see what comes out.

HTH

Captain Chaos

[GordonCopestake]

the 8i is f10 i believe... So perhaps a tad less than 3 minutes would be enough. Although if your light pollution can stand it and your mount is accurate enough you can go for as long as you like and it shouldn't be over exposed. Shots of 5 hours or more are common place with dark enough skies (although not at this time of year i hasten to add)

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

I think it would be a good idea to use a light pollution reducing filter if you have that problem. My filter of choice is the CLS filter which seems to work well with the D50 Nikon camera that I use. Other filters are available and might work better with the light sensitivity curve for your camera.

Captain Chaos