I apologize for not returning to this thread earlier. This Christmas I received some additional equipment. I got a star drive for the equatorial mount, some additional eyepieces and filters and a Gosky smartphone digiscoping adapter. I knew this equipment was coming. So, I have been real busy searching the internet and watching YouTube videos to learn all that I can on the subject of astrophotography and photography in general.
Lately the weather has been clouding up after sunset. On a couple of fairly clear nights, I attempted to shoot the moon. The first attempt was a bust, my star drive was in the way. I was going to wait an hour or two. But, it was getting cold so I packed it up. My second attempt I tried taking a video with the star drive running only to discover I need to calibrate the speed. I think I'll wait for a warmer night for this.
I did get a fairly decent wide-field picture of the constellation Orion. After developing and post-processing the raw image in snapseed, I was able to bring out the colors of the stars and the Orion Nebula. It was just a little blurry due to taking a 10 second image on a stationary mount.
I have been seriously considering starting an Astrophotography thread here on the Geek Culture board. I would really like to see what other TGC Forum members have achieved. In addition this would be a great place for myself and others to get advice and suggestion to get the most out of their equipment. Please, give your thoughts.
Attached is a image of the waxing gibbous moon - 85% illumination, taken through 16x magnification binoculars, aligned and stacked with RegiStax from a 4 minute video using 814 frames from a total of 7200. The video was shot on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 at 5:30 PM standard mountain time.
