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Great Trapezium area exposures animation! Basically we can see nebula isophots on each grooving exposure. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Josef! Finally, the image below, (while not a true masking effect), shows how combining a previous evening’s longer exposure of M 42 with a shorter exposure highlighting the trapezium allows some detail to be seen in the bright center of M 42 and the “bat wing” appearance of the nebula.
Another clear evening and just had to go out with the AT80ED to observe and photograph. Below is a 32 second view of M42 using the recovered refractor and Orion 6.3 MegaPixel camera.
Whoops. I have downsized the image below.
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great image, thanks for posting it! as soon as you were talking about the telescope
at the meeting i wondered how Orion nebula would look with it 😉Thank you Jim! Must admit I am taken with the quality of this refractor. I’ve also “revived my old Canon T5 Rebel camera and the eyepiece projection components that had been gathering dust. The spring (looking ahead of course) night sky is great for seeing the most first magnitude stars. Wanting to test that AT80ED telescope further I have taken 10 second exposures of two of the 11 bright stars with the Canon camera and 20 mm eyepiece projection method as shown below. Hopefully I will get all eleven this month!
It looks like it just might be nice on Friday. Is Eagle Bluff available? Anyone interested in a Messier Marathon? There will be a bit of moon out there. It’ll probably hide some of the early western objects.
I see Northern light even from my backyard, no color though. It could be stronger about midnight – see https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/images/aurora-forecast-northern-hemisphere.jpg
Was out at 11 pm and the northern skies were bright with what I could not really distinguish between northern lights and thin clouds with falling precip illuminated by Rochester city lights. Colors were subdued and some areas seem to obscure background stars and so I was not leaning towards the phenomon not being northern lights. Today my neighbor and I discussed the same and now I see on our website and here: https://spaceweather.com/ that it was northern lights!
Whoops had a double negative in above post (two ‘nots’ in third line above). Erase the second ‘not’. BTW, is there a way to edit our posts (as we had in the legacy forum)?
Yes, the forecasts are saying it will start to cloud up by 9:00, so looks like no Messier Marathon.
Bob, yes, that was the northern lights. They were pretty good. They mentioned it on the 10:00 news last night and all they today they have been showing photos that people took last night.
Luka B. and Mike C. have provided me with great ways to use the AT80ED refractor with my Canon Rebel T5 camera. I had been unable to reach the focal point except with an eyepiece projection technique. This worked but there was a lot of distortion (curving peripheral field) in the images. Luka suggested using a Barlow lens to diverge the light path and effectively increase the focal length. I used the Orion 2X Shorty barlow between the scope diagonal and the Rebel T5 camera with its T piece and now the focal point is near the mid point of the focuser draw tube. Below is an image of the moon from 2 nights ago taken with this setup.
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I’m working with the Orion StarSeekerIV mount (Randy provided) and it’s built in WiFi and the Windows version of the SynScan Pro app. Using the Stellarium telescope plug in module it is possible to aim (slew) the AT80ED scope by clicking on the interactive sky map. One has to first define the ‘telescope’ configuration. I did this using the ASCOM platform and ASCOM telescope driver (provided by Sky-Watcher) for an alt-azimuth mount. One needs to use SynScan Pro to do a 2 star manual alignment first before using Stellarium’s go to function. Stellarium does not guide the scope per se but if the initial alignment is accurate one can slew to an object that then appears in the finder scope’s field of view. Haven’t done enough deep sky object searches yet to judge the accuracy and utility of this setup but I’ll be testing this on clear sky nights!
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