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I tried a few ad hoc shots of the milky way last time I was up in the mountains in Oman but nowhere near the quality youve got there.
Thanks Sticky. I'm mega jealous of your location. My back garden is bortle 5/6 so kind of tricky. Also the neighbour leaves two powerful spotlights on constantly which doesn't help. Would love a nice dark location like yours.
And that's a great shot by the way.
Have a shopping list of trackers/mounts telescopes.
I'm going down the lightweight portable route as large equatorial mounts are too heavy for carrying up a hill on Dartmoor
You need to do some post processing with the stacked image to draw the data out @Axe_meister. My stacked image showed virtually nothing other than stars. You need to 'stretch' the image in Photoshop, Gimp or such like. There's loads of tutorials on YouTube to help you along. It's trial and error and I'm only just finding my feet with it. I probably spend more time processing than actually taking the shots, however once you have your stacked image you can have as many attempts as you want processing it.
Once you get a tracking mount you should see a huge improvement. I can highly recommend the Skywatcher Az Gti. Great Goto ability and the tracking, at least on mine, is bang on.
Current short list for scopes are Williams optics 61 or Redcat 51
This video explains things much better than I could.
So SLR (Canon 50D) + L-Bracket+Small scope+Image Flattener+Barlow lens + Anti dew heating element.
Would that not get close to the max capacity.
My set up comes in at around 3kg and it's absolutely fine.My scope alone weighs just under 2kg and then there's my camera, field flattener and finder scope, which is a lump in itself. I have discovered that it has to be well balanced though, if not it doesn't track as well and you get slight star trailing. You can do without a Barlow lens if you're using a flattener too. I've not had any issues with dew so far so haven't use a heating element yet. Time will tell if I will need to.
Mine's only just recovered. And I thought guitar GAS was bad.
Feedback
Ok, here's the next one. Had a go at M51 Spiral Galaxy last night. My tracking was a bit off so the stars are misshapen, but I'm reasonably pleased with the pic for a first attempt. There's only around twenty minutes of data, whereas I could do with a couple of hours but it was getting cold and late and I'd already wasted an hour and a half trying to sort the tracking. Anyway, here's the pic ( you may need to zoom in a bit)
Had another go on Orion the week before, which turned out a lot better.