Widefield Cygnus & Lyra feat. Milky Way

[EA2007]

Taken last night, not ideal as it was the longest amount of daylight.

Images taken around midnight, 5 lots of exposures of varying times from 2 minutes to 4 minutes, all at ISO 400.

Tweaking in DSS needs some attention.

Enjoy.

[Psychobilly]

Hmmm Widefields... cant beat them....

Whats the Scope or lens details ?

I'm working up the milkyway from close to the horizon... I am hoping for clear weather around july's new moon and will take a few days off...

Peter...

[EA2007]

Hey,

Mount is in my signature (NEQ6 Pro, powered by a Celestron Powertank) and the lens is the standard stock lens that came with the Canon EOS 450D, think its a 18-55mm lens. Only had it zoomed in by about 1/8th to cut out the house and trees.

Manually focussed using the LiveView feature on the camera, going to have another go at processing it see if I can grab some more detail from the Milky Way, I needed more subs though but I was in need of bed and didn't wanna wake the rents up.

[Psychobilly]

Thanks for that... The 18-55 especially it seems the IS version gives excellent results for a "kit" lens...

Did you stop it down at all or use it wide open?

Peter...

[EA2007]

stop it down?

[Psychobilly]

Alter the aperture that the lens was set to..

Often the sweet spot of a lens is with it stopped down a bit ... as an example I use the 50mm f1.8 at f4 which give much better star shapes in the corners of the image...

The stars look very good edge to edge in the image so i wonderd if it had been stopped down...

Peter...

[narrowbandpaul]

nice result Ed....even more special as it also shows the problem of imaging near solstice....bright blue skies!!!

i think you did a pretty good job!

paul

[EA2007]

Thanks man, if it stays clear tonight then I'll give it another go....maybe around 2am.

I collimated it last night and the stars look pretty sexy as a result. This time I managed not to drop the secondary onto the primary when adjusting the screws!

[narrowbandpaul]

i cant believe Im saying this....but dude, if you think stars are sexy you need to get out more

.....stars are sexy though, especially through a triplet APO!!!

[EA2007]

isn't that a contradictory statement by yourself?

Anyway, I was joking btw! Megan Fox is sexy.......mmm, why can't I get a picture of her!

[narrowbandpaul]

i accept your megan fox and raise you emma watson!

[EA2007]

very good choice.

Kirsten Prout is a fav of mine, think she's in one of them new vampire films. she's hot these days!