Widefield picture (camera only, no scope), using a hand made tracking device: turn the screw once per minute to follow the stars! 3 * 3 minutes

Not great yet but I'll do other tests soon !

Nice night yesterday - some more pictures of the same objects, rephotographed with longer exposures

M27, the Dumbbell Nebula

I wonder what that is!

Albireo, twin star

M5, globular star cluster

M17, the Swan/Omega Nebula

M11, Wild Duck Cluster

Reprocessed directly from the RAW files using dcraw with DSS - much better without the noise reduction.

Some quick Sony NEX-5 pics

The conditions are really bad (white zone in the middle of Tokyo, 30 celsius, roof balcony), but for the fun I tried to attachmy Sony NEX-5 to the telescope, and tried a few objects at random (can't even remember what I shot) with the following settings for each object:
- 15 exposures of 5 seconds each
- ISO 3200
- 5 darks
- No noise reduction (or at least as little as possible)
- Sony ARW (raw) format
- Meade LT6 with Antares F6.3 focal reducer

We are interrupting this broadcast for a view (in blue) of the current radioactivity levels in Tokyo, in microsieverts/h for 15th and 16th of course. As you can see, pretty low (click image to enlarge)!

Same image processed by Warren/rigel123




And same image, re-reprocessed by me

Same image with some more processing via Masks in Gimp. Much better, the core is visible :)

Just for the fun: a picture made without any astronomy equipment, just my point and shoot camera and a mini 1$ tripod: I took 60 exposures of Orion (through the window) with my camera 10 x optical zoom. Each exposure is one second, ISO 1600, stacked in DSS. Anyone can do it. The resulting image is below (noisy, but Orion nebula is visible, including its color!)

M42 again, with new focal reducer for larger FOV, absolutely no comma, this is great. 140 subs of 11 seconds each. I think it's getting better

M81 - with really bad focal reducer



M51 with some color and more details

Messier 5, L: 68 frames@8 sec., R,G,B: 30 frames at 8 seconds

Taken this morning between 4:30 and 5:30AM, LRGB combination and processing done in GIMP.



After PhotoShop post-processing by rigel123/Warren

Some more tries at Saturn and M51 (Whirlpool galaxy) in early morning. Tried to get RGB on M51, but the dawn messed up the G and B takes... too bad!

M15 again



And M42 with some color at last using separate shots of LRGB filters (thanks to rigel123 for the LRGB combining and post-processing).

Another M42, larger field of view, some swirls visible to the left.

M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy

M33's Core

The same of M15, processed differently. The fact that the telescope's tracking was really bad is very visible. The core of the cluster is however much better.

M15 taken with 200 exposures of 2 seconds each. Among those, 121 hand-picked (some light but persistent winds blurred quite a few).




Picture was taken quite precipitously (focus not quite right, neither scope nor camera cooled down), after I saw a curious object cross the camera's FOV pretty slowly. No idea what it is (it was not visible with the naked eye) but I'd be curious to know! Below are the three first exposures, which include that object.