Posts Made By: Paul McCarl

Flaming Orion!

This one is also from my very first session with the LX-200. Rough polar alignment and nothing but piggyback to keep it simple. My Canon D60 digital SLR and the Vivitar 85-260mm zoom. Should have stopped down one stop.

You may notice a recurring theme. I have fallen in love with Orion.

Paul McCarl

My latest, greatest, and last for a while attempt at the North American Nebula.

This one is also from my very first session with the LX-200. Rough polar alignment and nothing but piggyback to keep it simple. My Canon D60 digital SLR and the Vivitar 85-260mm zoom. Should have stopped down one stop on this one, too. I shot it as it sunk into the clouds on the Western horizon, so I was only able to recover five frames and they all suffer from bad sky glow.

Hey all you D60 fans, what is the best way to capture the reds. They always seem a bit muted.

Paul McCarl

For my second outing with the LX-200 I decided to spend the time to drift align and try some prime focus. Of course, in my joy with getting some decent results, I totally spaced dark frames, and I hadn't made my flat field box yet at this point.

This is my very first attempt at M1 the Crab Nebula/Supernova Remnant. They won't be moth balling Hubble anytime soon due to my prowess, but I was surprised I got any detail. I used my scrificed Canon EOS Rebel G body to focus and I realize that I pushed the exposure a minute or two longer than the tracking justified, but it is a start. 8^)

Paul McCarl

Also from my second outing with the LX-200. I drift aligned and used the f/10 prime focus. I used my Rebel G to focus.

I am really pleased with this one. Yes, I see the collimation error and the slight magenta haze from my missing dark frame on the right side, but I am proud of this one. I am using it as my wallpaper on my computer. Besides, It's not about out-doing Ron, it is about enjoying your own art. Like the saying goes: It isn't having what you want, but wanting what you have that makes you happy.

Paul McCarl

This isn't my best Wide Orion. I was plagued with clouds, wind, a 67% moon, and a snorting horse! (Details on the horse in the user photos forum "Pier of Fear!") The reason I am posting this is to brag about a lens!

This russian m42 mount lens is a 200mm f/4.5. Look at that star field at f/5.6. Sharp all the way across. No coma. No color fringe. Bee-yoo-tee-ful!

I just bought a 75-300 Zoom APO lens. To maintain balance, if money goes out other lenses must be sold. So, I decided I should shoot Orion with each lens I own. I could compare them all and decide what stays and what goes. Besides, it helps sell a lens if you can say "look I just took this picture with it." I was just slapping a lens on, focusing, centering the Orion Nebula and taking a single frame. But the first shot with this lens was so great I had to do more.

I shot 21 minutes. Needs more, but with that nasty moon turning the sky white, I didn't want to go overboard. But I must say I am impressed. For now it is a keeper! The new APO lens may replace it, but we will have to see. You don't fix what isn't broken.

Paul McCarl

P.S. You will notice I used the Images Plus DEMO to combine the files. Now I own Maxim DL 2.0 and it was great with my ST-237 and my SAC 7, but it blows a gasket when you try and work with the big files a D60 is spitting out. Slow doesn't even describe it. Unuseable would be a better word. Likewise, my AIP4WIN came highly recommended, but also doesn't care for the big files. Since most of these files were short (60 seconds) due to the moon glow, it wasn't going to happen in Maxim. Of course, Mike's demo doesn't calibrate or align images in batch mode, so short of playing with the tiny tutorial images that come with it, it is hard to say how it will fit in with your work style. However, the one thing the demo does do is batch combine files that are already aligned. So I aligned them and flat and dark framed them in photoshop and then combined them in the demo. We won't talk about how I managed to get the image out without the little lines in it, but suffice it to say it isn't worth the effort to do regularly. What I can say is that Images Plus is lightning fast. I find some of the interface confusing, but that is probably just my Maxim DL mindset getting in the way.

Mike, if the rest of your tools are anything like the batch mode combine, you have one heck of a tool. Maybe I can find some poor CCD user who would really like Maxim DL or my AIP4WIN and get enough to buy Images Plus. Doesn't hurt that the programmer uses a camera like mine. (Yes, I know you upped the ante to a D1s.) Or maybe I can talk you into letting me review it for the Salt Lake Astronomy Society and get a comp copy. 8^) It sure looks like a killer program but it would be nice to be able to actually do a full cycle with my own images before dropping more cash on an unknown. Anyway Mike, thanks for letting me get a nap by delivering me from the time warp that is Maxim!

Hi all,

Boy! What a busy week. Between trying to buy a house, three family members in the hospital, and remodeling my Mother-in-laws bathroom, I have barely had time to breathe, let alone sleep. To top it all off, I caught a cold!

But Saturday night/Sunday morning around midnight I gave up on sleeping due to my hacking cough. I decided to let my wife get some sleep and went upstairs to the living room. Low and behold, the clouds had moved out and the stars were back! If you can't sleep anyway, you may as well go take a look, right?

So I threw my scope on the pier and started out with the Moon. It has been a long time since I had shot the Moon and it looked so good I decided to go get my camera and snap a couple shots. By the time I got back it was going down behind the mountains. So I decided to test all my focal reducer combinations out on Orion. But after I finished I realized that a fence post was blocking most of my light. I was impressed however with my f/2.7 combination of reducers. I had my f/6.3 on the back of the SCT, followed by the T-adapter, my f/5 t-threaded reducer and then the T-ring and my camera. My best measurement guess is f/2.7 using a comparative measurement of the separation of two stars versus an F/10 shot of the same area. Someday, I will drag out the Covington book and do the math correctly, but I think f/2.7 is pretty close.

Anyway, I got a crazy thought wondering how many messier objects I could shot in an hour. I was polar aligned, but I hadn't refined it like I should and I was only screwing around, so I set the camera to ISO 800 and my timer remote to three minutes and started with M42. Now my hour gave way to closer to six hours, and I even switched back to f/10 for some planetary nebulas in the middle. I also have to admit that I couldn't help myself. Some of the objects like M51 and M101 were so cool that I had to take some extra frames to make the image better. So twenty objects in six hours is probably not a record, but it does show what a digital SLR and the Go To function of a Meade LX-200 are capable of.

Most of these shots are single exposures of 180 seconds at ISO 800 processed in Photoshop 4.0. I didn't autoguide these and in fact, I just focused on a bright star and let the scope center the object for me. Most weren't dead center, but they were all well within the field of view. The sky was already getting blue as I tried to shoot stuff in the Sagittarius region, M8 turned out OK. I can't wait for summer.

Thanks!

Paul McCarl

P.S. it was good for my soul but bad for my cold.

Well, it's been a while since I shot anything of the moon, but I was waiting for it to set and figured what the heck? I actually liked it enough to get a print made.

Paul McCarl

This is probably my last attempt at Orion for this season. It turned out ok, but my attempt at the flame and horsehead the same night is not worth posting and the rosette only just barely turned out. They were just too low in the muck. The mountains to my west just are shrouded in a mist from the evaporating snow that causes a real reddish cast to everything near the horizon. Oh well, I guess I will be glad to see them again next winter.

Paul McCarl

Hardly worth posting. I was having trouble seperating the red nebula from the red sky muck. I will have to try it next time with a 300mm lens. The multiple focal reducer just adds to much distortion, etc.

Paul McCarl

Tried a f/6.3 reducer corrector on M101 this time. I lost a third of my frames to wind, but on the whole it turned out pretty good. Now I am really curious about that little blue blob. I have seen it in other pictures I have taken of M101, so I believe it is real. It really looks like a planetary nebula. It is almost dumbell shaped and has similar color characteristics to the dumbell nebula and other planetaries. Anyone know what it is? It isn't in Deepsky 2000, and that is my best charting software.

Thanks,

Paul McCarl