This is me peering deeply into the Pleiades cluster. So deep, even with my field widener attachment, that I could only see two of the stars within the cluster. And this field is 40 arc minutes across. Now, obviously, this isn’t a properly deep picture, like you would see in some expensive CCD camera advert (that doesn’t give a price), or a magazine pic of the week. But to me it is deep, because it shows lots of blue clouds floating about between the stars, reflecting their spectrally blue cosmic light. It wasn’t a long, or particularly well tracked set of camera exposures, but it’s the subject I’m interested in, and my aim is to maximise the aesthetic appeal of the final picture. Contributing to that appeal is a particularly quirky set of flare lines coming off the star Alcyone at the left that provides a skewed detail to the picture. The streaky nebula at centre is named after the star, Merope which is only 30% as bright as Alcyone.
As I do astronomy on a budget, I like to see what I can fudge together or get away with. I do not have sophisticated tracking equipment on my SCT, just the R.A. motor and a manual guiding 1 x sidereal rate hand controller. This would suffice if I were to enjoy spending hours typically at -2ºC, hunched over an eyepiece, trying to counter the effects of wind and drift in my motor versus the sidereal rotation of the earth. I can't be doing with this and my knowledge of optics tells me that at f/4 compared with f/10 optics, the light gathered per area is 2.5x2.5=6.25 times greater thus shortening exposure times. I got hold of a second f/6.3 field flattener and after many long attempts with various coupling adapters I found a combination that worked with the focus at the end of its travel. I had to use a 1 1/4" adapter (I will get hold of a 2" version ASAP) so the vignetting (edge-of-field clipping) is quite severe; still it gives it a lovely 'through the telescope' quality! This is the Pleiades with an effective focal length of 800mm and aperture of 200mm in a single shot of about a minute.
