Unless you enjoy astroimaging, there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that you'll find anything of interest in this post. And even if you are an "insider," you may be bored beyond belief.
The photograph shows my basic setup in the "driveway observatory" and the longer-term "vision." I'm starting in the "easy mode," meaning widefield DSLR astroimaging. And in the next year I want to add prime focus imaging at f/6.3 through the Celestron 14" using a dedicated astroimaging camera. (Click for large view.)
The widefield set-up is as follows: CG5-Go To mount, which has been a pleasant surprise in both go to accuracy and tracking, given its relatively low cost. Borg 77mm astrograph at f/4 with the Borg super reducer: no surprise here. An excellent instrument free of chromatic aberrations with flat-fields edge to edge. Celestron 102 guide scope: again, a pleasant surprise given the very low cost of this instrument. Meade DSI camera for guiding only. (I would not recommend this device for imaging.) Canon Xti DSLR for imaging.
The Borg/Xti combination yields a 167'x251' Field of View with a 2394x3520 pixel array at 4.28 arc seconds/pixel. The M-35 image posted immediately prior to this post shows both the "costs and benefits" of such a setup. Very wide FOV (2.78dx4.18d) showing a few hundred of the dim bulbs that make up Sagan's "billions and billions of stars." But at 4.28 arc seconds per pixel the exquisite nature of "cosmic jewel boxes" like NGC-2158 is simply not apparent, becoming little more than a smudge. M-35, on the other hand, is nicely resolved.
The data acquisition and processing details are:
Camera control with ImagesPlus 2.82 using the Xti and Borg f/4 astrograph
Five subs at 1 min/ISO1600, unguided on March 16
Eight darks at 1 min/ISO 1600
No bias or flats
Converted, calibrated, aligned, stacked and stretched in ImagesPlus 2.82
Resized in PS CS2
Astronomy Tools star color action
Converted for the web in PS CS2
Incidental notes: "in the field" PC control via a Dell Inspiron. All processing done on a Dell Dimension 2 gig memory Intel duocore. I highly recommend Mike Unseld's ImagesPlus and Noel Carboni's Astronomy Tools.
There are multiple examples online of expert-level widefield DSLR astroimaging. I'll leave you to your own devices in that regard. Special thanks to Eric Jacob who's been a constant conversational partner and source of advice and encouragement.
There are only a few who are achieving expert-level imaging with the C-14. The most inspiring and generous with his advice is Lyndon Thompson. http://www.lyndonthompson.co.uk/
Cheers.
Max
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