Equipment
The equipment I use is basically off the shelf and unmodified. The primary insturment is a Meade 8 inch schmidt cassegrain originally purchased in late 1982 by Herman Moulden. The scope was mounted on a Losmandy G-11 in late 1999. The second scope is a Meade 10 inch LX-3 SCT that was purchased in mid 1985 by Lonny Clark. This scope has yet to be mounted on the G-11 and is used for "quick and dirty" observations (visual). I use two cameras-a Pentax K1000 and a Pentax LX. I bought both pre-owned and they are in excellent condition. The list following is the goodies I use to produce the photos:
| Meade 8" SCT | Losmandy G-11 mount | Pentax LX Camera | Pentax 300mm f/4 lens | Takumur 135mm f/4 lense | Pentax 50mm f/1.4 lens |
| Pentax 50mm f/2 lens | Pentax 28mm f/2.8 lens | Lumicon Easy-Guider (set at f/6.5) | Orion 9mm illuminated eyepiece | Lumicon 3x relay diagnal | Meade 3x barlow |
I guide at around 667x so that my guiding errors are small. Hopefully at f/6.5 (~1320mm) errors will not show up. My current film is Kodak Max Versatility Plus 800. I want to try Konica Centuria 400, but it is difficult to find. Kodak Tech Pan 2415 is now out of the question since the production of this film is to end sometime in early 2005. Hopefully Kodak will decide to continue the production of such a fine film.
The photos were processed with Adobe PhotoShop 5 using differnt techniques. I am still learning the "black art" of image processing and it is taking a lot of time to get the images just right. I recently figured out how to remove some uneven field illumination from photos and am trying to do a little unsharp masking just to see if I can pull it off.
Note: Some of the distance data I have comes from Burnham's Celestial Handbook [BCH] (1977) and maybe a bit out of date. The distances will be revised as I find them online. Also if the image does not have distance data-it does not apply to that image--there maybe too many objects in the frame to list all the distances. I hope to include atlas page numbers (Sky Atlas 2000.0 and Uranometria 2000.0) in the future.
