In March last year I obtained a photo of the Orion nebula that I was quite pleased with, but later was a little frustrated that my old 3 inch (75mm) aperture refracting telescope was a bit wobbly on my new alt-az driven mount, as it’s so long. I have been trying an assortment of long photographic lenses, but this year took the plunge and got a compact 500mm focal length telescope with a 100mm objective lens.

I have finally been able to try it out in dark skies, and was first of all really pleased by the view of M42 through the eyepiece. A few days later I was able to get the camera on the end of the telescope, and the very first image on the back of the camera had me amazed. It was just a 20 second exposure, but showed so much.

The image above is a stacked composite of 8 images, total 160 seconds exposure, ISO 1600, using RAW format. I fiddled a bit with the contrast etc to get the result here, but I can see that I will have a lot of fun with this setup.

Since we were clearly not going to be able to do our usual foreign travelling this year, I bought what is really a long wide aperture telephoto lens, but is also usable as a telescope, for my astrophotography. It’s a Sky-Watcher Startravel 102 obtained through First Light Optics. I am really pleased with it.

The red glow is from a 12V power supply I made, which uses a 4 cell LiPo battery with a regulator.