My astrophotography rig .. And the results..

[Fumesucker]

For some reason I decided to do a little astrophotography last night, I'm not sure why I sometimes get a wild hair but I'm just a serial obsessive and my focus changes from time to time. I really haven't done any photography in a while so I haven't been on this forum since my obsession changed some months back.

I have a six inch f4.5 Newtonian reflector on a German equatorial mount with slow motion controls on both axes but no clock drive. The mount has an alignment scope with a special reticule built into the polar axis that lets you line up with Polaris so you are reasonably close to perfect polar alignment.

I used an aluminum C-clamp, an aluminum bar with a couple of holes drilled in it and a pair of old vise grips to mount my A-100 DSLR to the scope so I could control it with the slow motion controls on the mount. I used an old Yashica 50mm f1.7 lens set at f2.8 since it is about as sharp as a bag full of wet mice wide open. I have an adapter which lets me use M42 screwmount lenses on the Sony, which has a Minolta AF bayonet mount. I have a box full of prime screwmount lenses from way back and the Yashica just happens to be about the right focal length for what I wanted to do last night. Thirty seconds is the max my camera will do without going on "bulb" setting so that's what I used at ISO 800 and noise reduction turned on, which takes an extra image with the shutter closed after your exposure and automatically subtracts it from the image you just took.

Light pollution is a serious problem where I live, our property abuts right against a filling station on one side and across the street is a large illuminated parking lot for a grocery store.

Tracking the stars was done by hand with the polar slow motion control, I used a 28mm eyepiece and a 3x Barlow lens for about 75x power and just put a bright star right against the side of the view and tried to hold it there by turning the slow motion control as smoothly as I could.

This image of the Pleiades is 10 30 second exposures aligned, stacked and processed with Iris, which is the most powerful astronomical imaging freeware I've found. The blue nebulosity which surrounds the bright stars is just starting to become visible. What's really interesting is that the light pollution is so bad at my location that I could just barely see the Pleiades at all with my naked eye and in a dark sky they are an easy and obvious target.



To give you some idea of the power of astronomical imaging software, here is one of the raw frames I took just as it came out of the camera, it has only been resized.



And here is the stacked and processed full frame I took the crop above from.



And here is my astrophotography rig..









The bucket below the scope is full of sand and hanging from the tripod by a strap to help stabilize the mount, getting the shakes out is one of the hardest things about astrophotography..

[Mira]

1. You have no idea how glad I am to see you, fumesucker.

I must leave the understanding of your photographs to others (beautiful shots though, and utter creativity in the rigs)
but I have the technology to welcome you back.
I have read some of what you have said, lately, and I have been concerned about your welfare.

[Celebration]

2. Glad to see you--

Looks like a potential November contest entry to me--

"Starry, starry night"

Anyway, it is very cool looking.

Every time there is a meteor shower there seems to be clouds here. I wasn't planning on photographing it, just looking at it.

[Fumesucker]

3. Thank both of you for your kind words..

I have a couple of other shots I've taken in the last few days that you might like.

The Moon, illuminated by reflected light from the Earth, Earthshine.



This shot is Orion’s belt and the blurry streaks really, really show off the gorgeous colors of the various stars. The yellowish ones are usually F or G type, the white, bluish and greenish ones are O, A or B and the reds tend to be K or M.

For example the end stars of Orion’s belt are both type O and the middle one is a B.

The fuzzy object at about eight o'clock from the central star is the great nebula in Orion, the brightest deep sky object, can bee seen with the naked eye even from light polluted areas.

This was my Yashica lens wide open, you can see how blurry the image is.

[Mira]

4. Oh My God !!!!!

(not to be confused with "OMG GOP WTF")

These really get me.
So I send this to you, and to Celebration, and anyone who wants to see and hear an unexpected twist on "Starry Night".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvLq0TYiwI

[Fumesucker]

5. That was very cool and inspired me to play with one of my own pictures a bit..

[Mz Pip]

6. Those are really cool

I'm impressed with your set up. You did a terrific job.