First Imaging Attempt

Last night was the first clear night we've had since I got my telescope nearly a month ago. Previously there had been only two occasions where a brief hole opened up in the clouds for about 20 minutes where I was able to view the moon. But last night was cloud-free and no moon. After putting my daughter to bed, I set up in the backyard. Aligning via All-Star align was a breeze. Mars was high in the sky so I slewed over to it and popped in a 2X barlow and a 23MM 2" eyepiece. I could immediately notice the polar cap, and as I stared at it for a few minutes began to notice a few details on the surface, despite the fact that the image was quite small. I think I need to get a shorter eyepiece for planetary viewing.

Given that this will be Mars' best apparition for the next four years, I wanted to try imaging it with my Nexstar camera. After spending a few minutes connecting the camera to my laptop and figuring our how to use wxAstroCapture, I centered Mars in the field and replaced the eyepiece and barlow with a 1.25" adapter and the camera. It took a bit of playing around to get it centered, but was finally able to get a bright blob in the center of the screen. I then spent several more minutes figuring out how to adjust the camera setting and focusing the image. Once it looked reasonable, I started capturing frames. I took three videos, two of 1000 frames and one of 2000 frames.

I then decided to try my hand at deep-sky imaging, and turned the 'scope towards M42 in Orion. It was beautiful through the eyepiece despite my light-polluted suburban Seattle skies. I then attached my Nikon D40x and spent several minutes trying to focus the image. I think I may invest in a Bhatinov focusing mask to help with this in the future. Once I got reasonably focused, I took a series of 30-second shots.

As it was now getting rather late, I packed everything up and went inside. Unable to resist the urge to see what my images looked like, I fired up the computer and transferred the pictures to it.

First I took a look at the .avi files of Mars. The raw video showed a fairly unimpressive blob, but after stacking with Registax I was got this:

This was a stack of 407 frames out of 2010. No processing was done beyond simply stacking and wavelet processing. The polar cap is visible, and some surface detail as well. I'm not sure if the light patch on the Western limb is clouds.

Next I used DeepSkyStacker to process the M42 images. I had eight good 30-second frames. This is what I got:

I realize that this isn't magazine-quality, but I was pleased at the result given that I'm an utter novice at this, and this was the first picture I have ever taken. Keep in mind that this is also an unguided image taken with an alt-azimuth mount in light-polluted skies with no processing beyond stacking. This is also a .jpg image that is greatly compressed from the original high-resolution RAW image (that one looks much better).

Now I need to start learning how to process the images in order to bring out the details. Overall I was quite impressed by the performance of the scope and the fact that I was able to actually capture something. Now I just hope we get a few more clear nights so I can practice.