Last month I bought a ZWO Seestar S50. Astrophotography was getting to time consuming and complicated. And, living amongst the trees didn’t make it any easier 😉. So I needed a quick fix to get me going again. This smal smart telescope does the trick for me. Easy setup, point and shoot.

First goal? Taking a photo of all 110 messier objects.

I am amazed by this image. It only took me 25 minuten of exposure time to get this result. 

Although the Seestar app also does some editing, I took ik on me to learn a free app; Siri’s. Together with GIMP, installed on my IMac,I found the perfect combination of imaging and processing.

Reprocessing the M33 files.

This is a reprocessing job on The Triangulum Galaxy. This is a spiral Galaxy approximately 3 million light years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33. The Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local group of galaxies, which includes our own Milkyway Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy and about 30 other smaller galaxies. This Galaxy may hold 40 million stars, thats about 10% of the stars in the Milkyway. The small pink area's in this picture are star nurceries where newborn stars cause the surrounding gas to glos.

The exposure time on this object is 1h41m @ISO 1600. camera: Canon 400D (Baader mod.). Telescope: 8" Newton telescope on a Syntrek EQ6 mount. 

Deepsky anyone???

This is my first try on deepsky photography. I used a Konica Minolta Z2 digital camera. This camera was mounted "piggyback". I took 10 frames with an exposure of 30 seconds each. The film sensetivity was 400 ASA. I used AstroStack to stack the pictures into one frame. On the original picture (12 Mb TIFF) the blue reflection nebulae around de stars 0f M45 are a littlebit visable. This photo contains star up to Mvis 11!