Antares Region with Zoom lens

[Carole]

This is going to be a vastly inferior image to Mark's, but done entirely with DSLR/Camera lens and Ioptron skytracker and obviously no guiding.  PA was better one night than the other. 

I have come to the conclusion that my Zoomable 200mm lens is not quite up to the job with weird shaped stars in one corner - luckily I managed to crop them out.  Lowest on Zoom lens is f5.6, the Nifty 50 produces better data at F3.5.

Anyway, I tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear and get something for my pains.  I ended up combining data from three different evenings at two different zoom lengths.  Even then I have still needed to add the data from the Nifty 50 lens to make a larger FOV.

Good old Registar.

So here we have:
Zoom lens at roughly 100mm f5.6 = 5 x 4mins + 32 x 3mins + 15 x 2mins
Zoom lens at roughly 120mm f5.6 = 24 x 4mins
Nifty 50 lens at f3.5 5 x 5mins + 22 x 4mins
If I have totted it all up correctly and not left anything out it should be a total of 4 hours 19 mins.

[MarkS]

I think you've done a good job of processing that.  The colours look good and you have clear dark lanes.  It's the light pollution that is the problem.  I wonder what sky quality reading you had?  You said you couldn't see the Milky Way, so it clearly wasn't good.

Mark

[Carole]

Thanks Mark.

Well I took a look at a LP map before we went, this was a European LP map, and Estepona which is just up the Road probably about 5 km up the road is Red and where we were was a patch of yellowy slight orange, so whatever that means.  To be honest I don't think it was any better than Bromley, I could only just see the plough and polaris.  Scorpio was discernable some nights but only Antares and maybe one other star on others.   When the Moon rose over Estepona, it was Pinky Red each night.   You could say the redeeming factor was clear skies, but I could not believe it that each night I imaged, clouds came in for half the imaging time, either from the main land or from Morocco.

Carole