2011 Honing of Skills
Having established the initial equipment described in the "A New Beginning 2010" gallery and become familiar with 'capturing the light', darks, flats and the value of RAW images, 2011 was a year of slowly understanding image processing skills whilst capturing a yearly cycle of objects. This period also helped me understand the capabilities and limitations of an 80mm aperture in suburban skies with an unmodified DSLR and a single Light Pollution Suppression filter
I finally got a Field Flattener in January 2011 and this has been very successful (Hotech 2" SCA FF). Also shortly after that, a 2X 2" Televue PowerMate for longer focal length (and f/ratio) imaging which has been much less useful than I had hoped with the 80mm f/6 APO Refractor. I did not return to using it in fact until the second half of 2012 after realising that I had not been using it correctly, but also frustrated by the fact that needing to use a 80mm, 2" extension tube inherently causes instability and deviation from optical axis with resulting flatness, focusing and guiding issues.
By late in the year I was beginning to think about a second optical tube assembly and was most impressed by the Boren Simon 8" PowerNewt that I borrowed from Jean Marie Locci for several weeks in December 2011. The speed and extra light grasp of this f/2.8 OTA is quite impressive. Using a Newtonian comes with the need to pay attention to collimation, something unnecessary for refractors. Newtonians are not ideally suited for planetary use due to the reduced contrast caused by the central obstruction and secondary mirror spider assembley causing diffraction effects. This however should not be a signicant issue to me as I am more interested in deep sky objects, and at this stage I intend to keep the 80mm APO, so it would be available for that role, albeit with the need to arrange a reliable longer focal length configuration.
Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia. I did my first dark sky field trips in March and August to a small property NW of Wagin owned by Dusty Miller, a friend of Jean-Marie Locci's.
My favourites shots can also be found on AstroBin http://www.astrobin.com/users/scottastrophe
Read MoreI finally got a Field Flattener in January 2011 and this has been very successful (Hotech 2" SCA FF). Also shortly after that, a 2X 2" Televue PowerMate for longer focal length (and f/ratio) imaging which has been much less useful than I had hoped with the 80mm f/6 APO Refractor. I did not return to using it in fact until the second half of 2012 after realising that I had not been using it correctly, but also frustrated by the fact that needing to use a 80mm, 2" extension tube inherently causes instability and deviation from optical axis with resulting flatness, focusing and guiding issues.
By late in the year I was beginning to think about a second optical tube assembly and was most impressed by the Boren Simon 8" PowerNewt that I borrowed from Jean Marie Locci for several weeks in December 2011. The speed and extra light grasp of this f/2.8 OTA is quite impressive. Using a Newtonian comes with the need to pay attention to collimation, something unnecessary for refractors. Newtonians are not ideally suited for planetary use due to the reduced contrast caused by the central obstruction and secondary mirror spider assembley causing diffraction effects. This however should not be a signicant issue to me as I am more interested in deep sky objects, and at this stage I intend to keep the 80mm APO, so it would be available for that role, albeit with the need to arrange a reliable longer focal length configuration.
Unless stated otherwise, images are from my home location in Willetton, 12 Km south of the centre of Perth, Western Australia. I did my first dark sky field trips in March and August to a small property NW of Wagin owned by Dusty Miller, a friend of Jean-Marie Locci's.
My favourites shots can also be found on AstroBin http://www.astrobin.com/users/scottastrophe
Acrux - Alpha Crucis - 2/1/2011 (Processed cropped stack)
The brightest star in the Southern Cross (constellation Crux) and the 12th brightest star. A double star approx. 320 LY from us.
DeepSkyStacker 3.3.2 Stacked 85% of 6 Images ISO 800, 120 Sec, 11 DARK, 0 BIAS, 0 FLATS, Post processsed with Adobe Photoshop CS5
Telescope - Apogee OrthoStar LOMO 80/480 with Hotech SCA T-Adapter, Hutech IDAS LPS-P2 filter, Canon 400D DSLR, Ambient xxC (not recorded). Mount - Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro. Guidescope - Orion ShortTube 80 with Star Shoot Auto Guider.
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