These shots would probably be a bit more impressive if I had actually got the right film!! I ordered Fuji Superia 800 but got something called Fuji "Press" 800 than leans rather (!) heavily on the oranges and reds. The frame on the left is what (with some dismay) I saw come out of my slide scanner. On the right is about 10mins work in Photoshop. (Gotta' love that software!!) This attempt was a 5min exposure at f/6 and guided at f/10 through a Lumincon CEG.

More importantly: This shot is a great example of how much those DEC fixes helped. Especially the "Scopetronix LX50 DEC Fix Kit". I don't thing I've ever gotten such good guiding out of my LX50. The difference from my pre-fix shot of M42 is outstanding! Thank you Jordan Blessing!!

As usual clicking on the images brings up a larger version.

Well in the middle of all these months of rain I managed to get a couple of starry nights. On one of these I waited until 3am for Orion to be in a decent part of the sky so I could take a couples of shots. Where I'm living at the moment I'm very geographically challenged when it comes to my favorite DSO. South and southwest are on the other side of the house (that covers Polaris), on directly the opposite side of 2 #$&?! streetlights, and last but not least, across the road. Its fun having a exposure ruined by a garbage truck. Really. ;o)

So one amazing Friday night everything came together. For a start, it was Friday and it was clear! Gosh!! No moon either! Unbelievable. So I setup the scope at nightfall, drift aligned, had some fun with Jupiter and Saturn, and generally froze my titties off waiting for the great hunter to come out from behind the pine trees on its way to setting in the west.

Once again the Lumicon CEG is a great piece of equipment. I configured the reducer for imaging at f/6 so I could guide at f/10. Even this wasn't enough to make up for the sick DEC tangent arm on my LX50. Every time I had to make a correction in DEC I invariably wound up chasing the blasted guide star all over the $#%$# 9mm illuminated reticule ep. (I've been told the days you just want to chuck everything in the pool and take up a nice relaxing hobby like bungee jumping or alligator wrestling are actually an integral part of the hobby....)

Despite my DEC woes the Lumicon CEG and trusty AE1 performed admirably despite my poor choice of film and overexposure. I used Kodak Gold 400 and exposed for 30 minutes. I got great advice from Michael McNeil and Paul LeFevre over on SCT-User. Kodak Gold is a no-no for this sort of thing due to terrible red response. Fuji Superia 800 and Kodak Ektapress 1600 (sp??) are MUCH better for this type of fun and games. Oh and 30 mins is waaayyy to much! Mike suggested a test roll of 1600ASA film starting at 5 minute exposures and going up in 2 or 5 minute increments. Hehehe. Oops!

The negatives were scanned with my old Epson FilmScan200 and imported into PhotoShop. I unsharp masked by "Amount 64, Radius 13, Threshold 0," and then by added a 0.4 pixel radius Gaussian Blur before tweaking the brightness / contrast settings a little bit, and voila! Nowhere near perfect but getting better and hot damn is this a LOAD of fun! Click on the image for a larger version...

Well it'll never make the cover of S&T but I finally managed to bag my first DSO on film! If you try really hard and think along the lines of "Where's Walley" you can juuuust see M57 hiding in the glare to the lower left of center... (click on it for a bigger image or you'll go cross-eyed!)

This masterpiece is a 30min exposure on Kodak Gold 400 shot at f/5. It was manually guided at f/10 with a Lumicon CEG and a Meade 9mm illuminated reticule ep. If I recall correctly it was close to full moon when I shot this so that and the reducer accounts for the brightness... But hey! Look!! No trails! Oh any you should have seen what the raw scan looked like before I ran it into the ground with PhotoShop! ;o) Yeeech!

Is it a so-so tri-color CCD image? Nope! Its what I could extract from the source above! All done in PhotoShop. Adjusted the contrast and brightness, sharpened it up a bit and voila!

Then still not content with the desecration I've brought on this wonder of our night skies, I actually grabbed the above and toyed playfully with it a little more in IRIS 4.2 and came up with these!!

Still its pretty impressive how much you can stretch an image digitally with the right software... With a little more practice (mainly) and a better scanner (cheap excuse!) and I just might start producing some images that are actually recognizable! Clear skies everybody and thanks for lookin'!