Posts Made By: Roland Christen

My first thought would be that a color camera is very limiting for deep sky imaging. If you are strting out brand new, you will get better results with a dedicated black&white camera. It will go deeper and give you better resolution (i.e. sharpness).

Your scope is not ideal for first time astrophotographers, but it can be made to work with a bit of perseverance.

I would start out shooting bright objects like M32 or M45 with 30 second exposures and stacking lots of them (50 to 100). This will minimize your guiding issues. It will give you an idea of what you can achive with your setup.

Long exposures of many minutes are only possible if you have some kind of guiding mechanism, and for CCD images, you really do not want to guide manually. Otherwise you will drive yourself nuts.

If you really want color on, you can either get a set of filters, or if you want, start out with a color camera, but be prepared to be somewhat disappointed in the results. A black&white camera can get you results that are close to what top imagers get, especially on the brighter objects. For the faint stuff, you will have lots of trouble with a color camera.

Rolando

>>a filter that provides for significant reduction in chromatic aberration while preserving the natural hue of the object being viewed seems to be optimum in meeting my expectations. >>

What you are doing in effect with any filter is removing the light from a particular wavelength. In an achromat, only the green and yellow come close to focus and the blue and red ends are basically out of focus, so the idea is to eliminate the red and blue light. There is really no way to preserve the natural hue of an object if red and blue is eliminated (unless somehow you put it back in and have it in focus). The object will be yellowish and your eye will eventually get used to it, but the blue detail is lost.

Rolando

I'm seriously looking at the new G35 Infinity Coupe. 300hp, available 4 wheel drive. Looks nice, and is more roomy inside.

Rolando

There is no other glass readily available and in general production that would be superior to these two. They are both very close in terms of optical characteristics with an ultra-slight edge going to the FPL53. The only other material that is superior in a very small way is Fluorite. All three can produce triplets of essentially zero color error. They can also produce zero color error doublets, but the focal ratio must be considerably longer because no suitable mates exist to provide fast focal ratios and zero color both at the same time in a doublet.

It is senseless to argue about these glasses because the overall correction is due to the mating element, not the ED. Why not lets argue about suitable mates, yes?

Rolando

And another Leo galaxy

The Cayenne scares me with that kind of hp. Imagine winding her up to 150mph and then entering a tightening off-camber sweeper . The 911, now that's another story

Rolando

You cannot repair a scratch or any other defect in glass unless it is re-ground, re-polished and re-figured. That is a big job, and the result will only work if it is returned to the factory that made it, since they would be the only people who would have the necessary test plate. Replacing the lens would be infinitely easier for everyone concerned. Of course, that assumes that the scratch would affect the image, which it most likely will not.

Rolando

Maybe your conditions were horrible, but your image is excellent!

Rolando

You captured IC 349 just below Merope. Try stacking a number of short exposures to capture the detail of this elusive object. Here is a closeup taken with my 10" Mak-Cass: http://geogdata.csun.edu/~voltaire/roland/ic349.html

Rolando

Lucky Ducky!! 8)

Rolando