PST imaging adaptor

To avoid the use of a diagonal I turned up an adaptor from a piece of aluminium that takes the PST eyepiece unit and allows a camera to reach focus without a diagonal, so there’s nothing else in the light path. I shall use this for my imaging, though I’ll revert to the diagonal for visual. I’ve been fortunate enough to obtain a second eyepiece unit, so I don’t have to keep swapping them over. Here’s the adaptor:

adaptor

And here’s how it looks in place on my modded PST:

adaptor-fitted

I continued the thread for the eyepiece unit all the way down the inside to try to prevent reflections reaching the camera. Now I shall paint it black using heat-resistant barbecue paint.

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Lay a little egg for me…

Over the last four or five years we’ve taken an incubator and chicken eggs into the childrens’ school for one of the classes to have in their classroom for the whole of the incubation period and perhaps a couple of weeks after the chicks hatch.

They have to be kept in a pen under a heat lamp until their feathers are well-developed (usually when they’re about six weeks old), but here are some photos of this years chicks on their first weekend in the outside world.

IMG_0030

IMG_0029

IMG_0023

IMG_0022

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Oh, go on then, just a couple more…

Yes, two more Messier globular clusters to add to the collection. These, M10 and M14, are the last for the time being. I have a few other things I want to try out now.

m10

m14

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Yet more Messier clusters

A change of target for the next imaging session. Having got as much as I felt I could out of M3 and M5 for the time being, I moved on to some new globular clusters. This time M53, M12 and M56.

I think M53 and M56 have much more potential, and it surprised me how relatively “open” M12 appeared compared with the others.

m53

m12

m56

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Feeding my cluster habit

Messiers 3 and 5 have become something of a fixation in my attempts to do some DSO imaging with the 127 Mak, but this night they were joined by the second Messier cluster in Hercules, M92. I think these may be my best so far.

m3

m5

m92

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Modded PST fitted to a dovetail

Someone suggested to me that Munsen rings might be a good way to fix my PST to a dovetail. As they looked far more straightforward than having to turn some fittings from solid aluminium I thought I’d give them a try. I managed to find a pair of 54mm brass rings on ebay which though slightly too large in diameter were perfect once I’d lined them with sticky-backed felt. Here’s the end result on the dovetail:

dovetailed

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Another accidental ISS

It seems as though sometimes you just can’t keep these people out of your images…

iss2

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Another crack at M3 and M5

The same details as my previous attempt the day before, but I think these ones are a little better. Focus is sharper, I think, and the colours have come through better.

m3

m5

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Widefield Bootes and Hercules

The night preceeding my M3 and M5 efforts I managed a couple of widefield images of the constellations Bootes and Hercules using just the 450D with the stock 18-55mm lens focused at around 25mm focal length according to the EXIF data, using exposures of 120 seconds. So much easier at such a short focal length 🙂 These are both stacks of 18 frames.

bootes-small

hercules-small

It’s not at all easy to pick out the stars forming the asterisms themselves, with the exception of Arcturus which is pretty difficult to miss.

For larger versions, follow the wide field images link above.

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Another couple of 127 Mak Messier objects

Hot on the heels of my “success” with M13, I decided to have a try at M3 and M5. I suffered the same problems with unusable subs for exactly the same reasons: it’s really pushing the mount too hard to expect the stock dual-axis motors and gearing to allow long exposures at a focal length of 1500mm. These two also suffer from a generous helping of noise thanks to needing to stretch the histogram so much. Again, longer exposures (and more of them) would almost certainly help.

I started with 60 exposures of 45 seconds for each image from the 450D, but dropped around half of them due to trailing. I’m not completely unhappy with them, but I’m not totally stunned either…

m3

m5

Oh, as well as M3 and M5 I also caught the ISS in one frame:

iss

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