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Hi John,

My setup consists of 5 separate buys.

1. Celestron Astromaster 130 EQ MD telescope, with 10 +25mm EPs and a Moon filter. The shop also added a free 15mm Celestron Omni Plossl EP (its the best 1 i have so far. The red dot finder is useless so it was removed, but it's mounting makes a great place to secure my solar filter so it cant blow off, The motor drive needs a new battery almost straight away.

Cost £140.

2. An LP filter, 6X20mm finder and a cleaning kit containing brush/ air blower, lens cleaning fluid and tissues.

Cost £30.

3. Starter scope EP upgrade kit, containing a 2X Barlow, Meade MA20 +12mm, and a Kellner 6mm EPs. The 6mm isnt very good at all, even on daytime terrestrial targets.

Cost £30.

4. A4 sheet of Baader solar filter film. Enough to make a full aperture solar filter, also some for my 12X50 binos. Some insulation tape, gluesticks and new scissors.

Cost £20.

5. Philips SP880NC webcam + adapter for prime focus imaging. Tested the A-focal image today on a mill a couple of miles away today and got a very good picture just holding the cam to the 20mm eyepiece. Worth a try at Saturn later with it taped to the 15mm. It can also fit to the piggy back mount on my tube rings.

Cost £32.

Adding £25 for 2 sets of cheap binoculars and £8 for another standard webcam to experiment with. The total cost is so far £285. However i'm not finshed yet, I need a set of planetary filters, and a hydrogen-Alpha. A Celestron Omni 32mm plossl EP, an 8-24mm zoom EP, a better 2X Barlow and a 3X too. They in total will cost around £240. I also want a laptop to get out to darker skies for imaging.

I used the Moon filter to reduce the glare of the Sun further than the solar filter to bring out the spots on screen and aid focussing and the barlow lens for double Magnification. Camera was set with lowered brightness, and very little gain. Exposure was at 1/250th, frame rate seemed unimportant but had it on 30fps. I would line the scope up then let the Sunspots drift through the FOV whilst recording. With Registax i would throw out anything less than 50% quality, once aligned, optimised and stacked. Under the wavelet tab, i raised layer 1 to 100% 6 at 60% and 2-5 staggerred in between 1 and 6 which sharpened up the image very well. Under the final tab, i used the HSL settings to bring out more contrast, lowering the brightness and saturation. Finally i resized the image to 200% and saved as a TIF file. 

The whole process took about 25-30 minutes in total.

Hope this will be of use to anyone starting out with a small budget.

All the best,

Baz.

johnjohnson

Another way to check to see how the Sun will fit in the FOV is to go out on a full Moon night and zoom on it with the camera and 250mm lens. The Sun and Moon cover the same arc minutes of sky. If the Moon frames well at 250mm the the Sun will also.

I did some daylight shots of the Moon awhile back (they're posted around here somewhere) so I can look at them to check image size.  I guess I could always crop the image and expand the final photo size a bit, as long as I don't overdo it and start losing sharpness and detail.

BAZ PEARCE

Hi John,

My setup consists of 5 separate buys.

1. Celestron Astromaster 130 EQ MD telescope, with 10 +25mm EPs and a Moon filter. The shop also added a free 15mm Celestron Omni Plossl EP (its the best 1 i have so far. The red dot finder is useless so it was removed, but it's mounting makes a great place to secure my solar filter so it cant blow off, The motor drive needs a new battery almost straight away.

Cost £140.

2. An LP filter, 6X20mm finder and a cleaning kit containing brush/ air blower, lens cleaning fluid and tissues.

Cost £30.

3. Starter scope EP upgrade kit, containing a 2X Barlow, Meade MA20 +12mm, and a Kellner 6mm EPs. The 6mm isnt very good at all, even on daytime terrestrial targets.

Cost £30.

4. A4 sheet of Baader solar filter film. Enough to make a full aperture solar filter, also some for my 12X50 binos. Some insulation tape, gluesticks and new scissors.

Cost £20.

5. Philips SP880NC webcam + adapter for prime focus imaging. Tested the A-focal image today on a mill a couple of miles away today and got a very good picture just holding the cam to the 20mm eyepiece. Worth a try at Saturn later with it taped to the 15mm. It can also fit to the piggy back mount on my tube rings.

Cost £32.

Adding £25 for 2 sets of cheap binoculars and £8 for another standard webcam to experiment with. The total cost is so far £285. However i'm not finshed yet, I need a set of planetary filters, and a hydrogen-Alpha. A Celestron Omni 32mm plossl EP, an 8-24mm zoom EP, a better 2X Barlow and a 3X too. They in total will cost around £240. I also want a laptop to get out to darker skies for imaging.

I used the Moon filter to reduce the glare of the Sun further than the solar filter to bring out the spots on screen and aid focussing and the barlow lens for double Magnification. Camera was set with lowered brightness, and very little gain. Exposure was at 1/250th, frame rate seemed unimportant but had it on 30fps. I would line the scope up then let the Sunspots drift through the FOV whilst recording. With Registax i would throw out anything less than 50% quality, once aligned, optimised and stacked. Under the wavelet tab, i raised layer 1 to 100% 6 at 60% and 2-5 staggerred in between 1 and 6 which sharpened up the image very well. Under the final tab, i used the HSL settings to bring out more contrast, lowering the brightness and saturation. Finally i resized the image to 200% and saved as a TIF file. 

The whole process took about 25-30 minutes in total.

Hope this will be of use to anyone starting out with a small budget.

All the best,

Baz.

 

 

Baz

Thanks for the exceptional break down on your equipment investments.That sort of information will certainly help other imagers get off to a good start and what they can expect of their equipment.

JJ

Your 6" reflector, a Sky View Pro mount and the Canon camera are all you need to take reasonably good deep sky photos.   The secret is longer exposures.....and longer total exposure time. 

I have not used the Sky View Pro (or a clone) but I suspect if you took some extra time to get it as precisely POLOR ALIGNED as possible, you could increase your exposure times to somewhere close to 60 seconds and still get round stars.   I use a Celestron CG5, which is no great mount.  Properly polar aligned I can sometimes get 2 minute exposures without guiding.....always at least one minute.

Really good polar alignment should greatly improve, if not cure drifting issues, and oblong stars.  Not sure if the Sky View Pro has a place for a polar alignment scope.   If so, they are relatively cheap and something you will use for years and years.

Not a thing wrong with your top photo that more time wouldn't fix.   Try doing 3 sequences of 20 x 30 seconds......giving you an hour of exposure time.   Deep Sky Stacker is free, and it will adjust for rotation.  Be sure to give them each a different file name.....m31 a, m31 b, m31 c, etc.   Then load them all into your stacking program.

I managed to get pretty good photos with a cheapo Orion ST80mm and a Canon XT....no guiding....but despite it's bright center, M31 needs time.....at least an hour from an urban site.

Super Shot!

John

Thanks much, JJ, and again, I forgot to click on the "notify me" button....geez....I'll get it right yet...

Donna

An update on the 6" ST imaging scope. It's been awhile since I have done any imaging but got a chance on Christmas day 2011. Here is a link to the report.

More Imaging with the 6" ST reflector

JJ

This has really nothing to do with Imaging..but it was bugging the heck out of me. Got tired of looking at that stupid Celestron NexStar SLT Beige paint on the guide scope.

I removed the dovetail and plugged the holes and painted it with gloss black epoxy paint. Looks much better to me.

The mount might get some black epoxy next!

JJ

A nice looking setup John, it looks a lot better without the beige.

Kevin Bozard

A nice looking setup John, it looks a lot better without the beige.

Ditto,,   I bet it works better outdoors too.