I know how excited people were with my first CCD image of a street sign, so I decided to see if the camera would be any good on astronomical objects. I went to Henry Coe on Friday night and devoted the evening to imaging through the Orion ShortTube 80 piggybacked on my Meade 8" SCT all mounted on a GM8. The first thing I *should* have done was take the time to do an accurate drift alignment. I was too anxious to play with the camera, so I did a rough alignment with the polar scope and stuck to short exposure times of anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute or sets of 15 second track and accumulate shots. Everyone who stopped by was pretty amazed when I got an image of the Horsehead on a 1 minute exposure. Nothing great of course, and I don't have any real image processing software. Even so, I was pleased with the first effort. I posted the images with just some adjustment to the contrast and balance and mild sharpening. If you are interested they are at...
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/m13.jpg
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/hh.jpg
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/m46.jpg
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/m51.jpg
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/m65.jpg
http://members.aol.com/richardsskyshots/m81.jpg
Sorry I didn't make a web page out of them, but I can't spend ALL my time on this stuff. :-)
