AstroTech 66 ED in Action

After wait of almost 20days, at last i got clear sky on 10th Feb. The sky condition was very good but temperature was chilling -15 Celsius !!!

I setup mount and scope and attached My Camera at prime focus. Now my scope is working as 400mm Tele lens...

I roughly aligned mount using polar finder and centered Moon, focused and bingo !!!

Got few nice images of moon....


using Moon as focusing aid, i turned scope to My Favorite M42...
I took series of photos from 5sec to 30sec at 100 ISO and 800 ISO. photos taken at ISO 100 was almost useless due to heavy light pollution, and at 800 ISO sky background turned red !!!

Also the images are soft-focused as focus shifted while adjusting telescope :(

I combined and processed images taken at 800 ISO and achived acceptable image of M42.

here is the result processed and cropped...



Following are the unprocessed crops from original images which are combined in above processed image..



Now weather here for next 15 days is expected to be bad :( and wait for clear night started again...

Cheers
Sameer