Still trying to figure this out.

Hello, you may recall that back in December I acquired a new telescope, a lovely 6 inch aperture newtonian. It’s taken 6 weeks until I had the chance to get out with. Such is the curse of new kit.I have done some imaging with it, but I’m missing something, I know the tracking is slightly out but when I try to stack the images the software I use doesn’t detect any stars. Which is odd as the images are full of stars, so I need to figure that out.

So I’m not posting those images on this entry, instead I’m posting some images that I’ve taken using the D3200 with a 70-300 lens. I set the lens to maximum zoom and took a few images to make sure it was focussed. In total I took about 100 images; after removing the first few that were focussing shots and those that had severe star trailing or other issues, I ended up with about 47 images that are worth keeping. So out of those 47 images here are a few that I’m very pleased with.

The bright orange object in this image is the Star Aldebaran in the constellation of Taurus. it is 66 light years from Earth. The planetary exploration probe Pioneer 10 is currently heading in the general direction of the star and should make its closest approach in about two million years.

The bright orange object in this image is the red giant betelgeuse.

In the centre of this image is a very faint Flame nebula. (NGC 2024)

Roughly centre of this image is a cluster of stars in the constellation of Gemini.

I can’t remember where the camera was pointed when this image was captured, but I really like it

The Orion Nebula, there’s a bit of star trailing but I’m pleased with the result

The Pleiades Cluster, M45.

The bright object in this image is the star Sirius in the constellation of Canis Major, at magnitude -1.46 it is the brightest star in the night sky.

So there you go, I plan to mount the camera on the EQ3 mount to get some long exposure images in the near future. I will post any that are of any merit.

Clear skies

K