nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

I will try again tonight. The forecast is the best forecast since spring. I am tempted to put the Vixen refractor on.....but I am setup, balanced, and waiting for dark with the Newt.

(Download)

Europa Loc: West Hills, CA

That IS pretty amazing...now you know where the bar has been set. Do you happen to recall (guess) how much exposure time you had on this?

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

I don't. In the name of disk space, I delete everything but the stacked, calibrated, registered file and there is no metadata in that. Also, I am now not positive I was using the Vixen refractor. There is a very very good chance this was with my Nikon F/4 200x400 lens. I can guess. If it was the Vixen - they would have been 1600 ISO and 120 seconds.....if it was the Nikon 1600 ISO and either 15, 20 or 30 second subs. I was also using 100 plus subs with every image. Tonight I plan on using 120 subs. I have upped the ISO to 400 and dropped the exposure time to 90 seconds. We will see....still using the Newt.

The Nikon Lens is a very good lens - I use mostly for field sports but I had ADM make vixen brackets that would allow me to mount on a vixen saddle. One thing I would bet money on...not that this matters. I was surely using the iOptron ZEQ25. Light weight......and a tracking master. I love this EQ mount. Polar aligns easily and tracks inside 1 arc min peak to peak. I started using the Atlas Pro last year more and more because of EQMOD. I don't use a hand controller anymore and love the mount just a much....it's just heavy.

One thing I did with this image was mask the stars and over saturate them. I plan on re-processing this image when i have time and see if I can make it a little more realistic. I get carried away in post.

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

What capture program do you have for the Nikon D800e ??? I can't get DigiCam 2 to work with it.
Craig

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

I use Backyard EOS for Nikon to take pics and save to a folder - If I am using a CCD camera - I use ATP (Astro photography tool) to capture images. I preview cull the images in Nikon NX-D while I am acquiring them. I use PixInsight to Calibrate, Stack, and Register - I also do 99 percent of processing in this program. I use PSCC for final tweaks. I am a great fan of Adobe Lightroom but I am not at all interested in keeping the subs or supporting files anymore. The take up too much storage. In PS, I have a number of plugins, OnOne, Nik, Topaz and others. I am a great fan of using luminosity masks for making selective adjustments.

CraigFair Loc: Santa Maria, CA.

Thanks Ed. Backyard EOS for Nikon & ATP (Astro photography tool) will give them a try.
Craig

nikonshooter Loc: Spartanburg, South Carolina

I highly recommend them! I have Sequence Generator Pro but rarely use.