I'm having trouble getting the G11/SCT combo to work shooting to the East, for some reason.
So, I decided to "make lemonade" and shoot to the West instead. This neatly avoids the rising
3rd-quarter moon (which was irritatingly high in the sky in Taurus tonight), and also gives me
a chance to compare Veronica's efforts with those of the new telescope (need to come up with a
name at some point...). So here's a 1-hour integration (30x2min) with the f/10 scope.
The image is noticeably magnified, which is nice. The stars have lost their diffraction spikes,
of course. And it seems like the f/10 scope isn't going to be the burden on my photography
that I worried about (in theory, exposures need to be 4x longer at f/10 than at f/5).
Probably worth another shot or two, just to see if I can pull out some more detail.
I tried a longer integration time on M27 (2 hours' worth of 3-minute images vs. an hour of 2 min)
...I think that I've reached the limit of what I can achieve with these skies and equipment,
since this photo isn't *that* much better than the 1-hour integration.
hmm.
Another attempt. I'm getting the idea that longer integration times lead to better detail and noise reduction...
M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, Planetary Nebula in Vulpecula
30 seconds has a lot of detail, but 2 minutes grabs even more...
M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, Planetary Nebula in Vulpecula
This is a stack of the following 2 images of M27.
The 5 minute image had nice blue nebulosity, and the 30sec images had some highly textured red,
so I decided to see what they'd look like together.
M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, Planetary Nebula in Vulpecula
This is the first shot after I performed the UV/IR filter removal on the D70.
Note that these images are 30 *seconds* long, 10 times shorter exposure than the image
taken two weeks ago with the same setup (but an unmodified camera). Big difference.
M27, The Dumbbell Nebula, Planetary Nebula in Vulpecula