One night with a CCD camera and no particular place to go
Setup, polar alignment, focusing, guiding, image selection, post image processing.... It all takes time and lots of patience. Sometimes I run short of the patience part and just want to take some pictures! Not complicated, long exposure pictures. Just like a tourist with a automatic camera. Point and shoot.
Last March, I went to the OCA Anza site with the goal of a "Mini Messier Photo Marathon". My setup was a 8" LX200 (polar aligned) and a StarlightXpress MX916 CCD camera. I used a 6.3 focal reducer and a flip mirror as well. Most of my shots were from 60 to 180 seconds and I generally took 3 to 5 images per target. The camera was binned 2X for all shots and 2 to 3 minutes exposures were possible with no guiding. I captured 40 objects in approximately seven hours. None are destined for Sky & Telescope but it was alot of fun!
M88, 56, 83, 80, 79, 41, 57, 78, 68, 66, 65, 64, 38, 63, 53
Collage #2
M51, 5, 42/43, 4, 20, 37, 3, 36, 27, 19, 17, 35, 16, 13, 12
Collage #3
M107, 104, 101, 1, 10, 100, 9
(These files are approximately 500K and may take awhile to load)
