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I assume that you did something amazing but can you please elaborate a little bit?

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Nyte was able to capture a faint planetary nebula (visual magnitude 13.5) using a 70mm refractor. I believe his tongue was firmly planted in his cheek, but it doesn't diminish the feat. He had to track the object for well over six minutes to get it to register, and yet his star images are nice and crisp. If his tracking was off by just a tiny bit, it would have elongated the star images.

Scroll up and take another look at his pictures again.

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Tim

Champion of small aperture scopes everywhere!

Meade ETX-125PE
Meade ETX-80
Celestron FirstScope 76mm Mini-dob

Updated: 09/16/2009

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Thanks everyone for your interest

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I assume that you did something amazing but can you please elaborate a little bit?

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info requested as posted in CN "General observing"

Last week our club joined a school's live lunchtime imaging session on the autonomous 2m Faulkes telescope in Hawaii and in the 30min allocated slot some five deepsky images obtained in brief RGB exposures and beamed immediately back - amazing

Later that week I thought I'd target the same objects from my light-polluted backyard via my piggybacked Meade ETX-70. With only 1/800th light grasp of the 2m Faulkes on a mountain-top there seemed little hope for success but the pic below provides the answer - v.faint PNe NGC 6842 in Vul via both scopes. Hope for us all me thinks.
Note the Faulkes exp = 3min; my ETX-70 exp = <8min + heavy contrast stretch so my image is real

Here's two more comparative images; top=NGC6934; bottom= NGC6940 - left = Faulkes Telescope rescaled x0.4; right = ETX-70 full size.

Faulkes v ETX vid

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Nytecam 51N 0.1W
Meade 30cm LX200+ETX-70+e-finder+C8+Ha+CaK PSTs SBIG SGS+homebuilt spectrographs
Starlight SXVF_M9+Lodestar CCDs/Canon 300D DSLR/Fuji E550
My observatory build-ETX-70 imaging-my videos




Edited by nytecam (07/21/09 04:43 PM)

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