CCD vs Film? Lots of time vs no patience? Alright, this is your place to discuss all the astrophotography what's and what's not. You can discuss about techniques, accessories, cameras, whatever....just make sure you also post some nice photos here too!
Hi,
After the visual observation session, I decided to image another M object since the weather (although was very wet) look clear enough and the Moon had not rise yet. While doing drift alignment, I realized that my visual polar alignment was off so much to the west that I running out of space on the azimuth adjustment on the GPD and my counter-weight will hit one of the tripod leg (I'm not using a half-pier)... I saw Lyra high up and decided to try image the famous M57 Ring Nebula. Although my polar alignment is not very accurate, but should be good enough for a 1.5 minutes exposure for an object 33 degree away from the celestial equator.
Below is the result: Non-crop version
Crop Version on the Ring Nebula
Capture Info
Telescope: Celestron 8" F5 Newtonian
Camera: Canon 300D Prime Focus with Coma Corrector
Location: Tampines, Singapore
Image: 30 x 1.5 minute Images @ ISO800
Have a nice day.
Yang Weixing "The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance."
Is that a hint of the central star in the second image?
Yes. Actually, the central star is very obvious in the initially processed image, but become barely visible after my additional standard processing which bring out the very dim nebula in the donut "hole".
Anyway, I compare the processed image and the one I upload to the web, the central star is a bit more obvious than the web version... may be due to the loss in the compression and quality setting of JPEG.
By the way, I check the photo that I printed out, it's look better and can still see the central star even the print out is an un-crop version.
Have a nice day.
Yang Weixing "The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance."
I saw Lyra high up and decided to try image the famous M57 Ring Nebula. Although my polar alignment is not very accurate, but should be good enough for a 1.5 minutes exposure for an object 33 degree away from the celestial equator.
"The universe is composed mainly of hydrogen and ignorance." 
