The sky looked reasonably clear last night, at least as well as you can expect for a red zone, so I decided to give the moon & m57 an attempt

1/400 sec, iso 100, 6.3 focal reducer in.  Resized for posting

Here's a 1:1 crop of part of it

 I then took the focal reducer out and did another:

1/100 sec, iso 100

and a 1:1 crop

 

I moved on to M57.  I didn't have alot of hope for this.  Prior attempts were totally wiped out by light pollution and/or hazy overcast.  I shot 20 30 sec subs & took 4 dark frames in the middle somewhere.  I'd intended to take quite a few more, but I discovered I really need a dew shield or zapper.  Or something.  My alignment was also not great, so I had some drift.  I ended up dumping 3 of the 20 frames and ran everything through DSS, then tinkered with the levels in photoshop a bit.

full frame resized here

and a 1:1 crop for detail

It's not great, but it came out better than I expected, so I'm happy with it.

I really like the shots on the moon without the reducer in place!  Shows very good detail.

Thanks for sharing your hard work.

 

 

 

Scott (can't be easy) B

There is a thread within this forum area for us to post our humble attempts, however I don't think these images qualify to be included in that thread or the humble attempts category. These are plenty good enough to stand on their own, too good for the Humble attempts thread. FYI, Personally I prefer the normal full frame ring nebula image. Cropping and resizing to enlarge that much looses to much in the way of sharpness and contrast.

Thanks for the kind words, both of you.  I'm still surprised m57 came out as well as it did.  I do agree that the full frame version looks better, but I'd say that's because you can't tell how poor the image really is.  The close up 1:1 pixel version tells the truth.  I may try reprocessing the series, however I think what's next on my agenda is getting it hooked up to my laptop for guided, longer exposures.  And a dew shield or zapper :)

These are not that humble.   Nothing wrong with your moon shots, and the M57 shots are very natural looking.   I wish mine were as good.   Keep up the good work.