I do not normally post images that I think are bad and while this one looks OK at a distance, please do not zoom in as the stars look terrible. Oh man was this an experiment gone wrong. I had the grand thought of attaching one of my Canon lens to my 2600MC and capturing some wide FOV images at the Texas Star Party (TSP).
Before TSP I spend several nights trying several different lens with my 2600 and no matter what I did, I could not get the focus ring on the lens to work. I researched Canon back focus and I watched several videos, but nothing worked. Finally, I had the brilliant idea of messaging Nico Carver
https://www.astrobin.com/users/2ghouls/ to ask what I was doing wrong. I had watched several of his tutorials using DSLRs and camera lens. Nico kindly informed me I was doing nothing wrong, but that many of the new Canon lens basically use 'focus by wire' system where the focus ring isn't mechanically coupled to anything. Basically, meaning the manual focus ring needs to be attached to a Camera to work. However, I did discover using fixed FL lens, I could come to pretty close focus by playing with the back focus.
So un-daunted I decided to go ahead and use my Canon 24mm lens with my 2600MC. On the 3rd night at TSP I decided to try and capture some images and I found out the FOV with my 24mm lens and the 2600 camera was not quite enough to capture the Milky Way. Therefore, I decided a mosaic was the way to go, so I did 4 sets of 10 images.
After getting home I started processing these images and just ran from one issue to the next. I finally did get a nice wide FOV image, but then I zoomed in and thought yikes those stars look awful, especially on the edge. I am guessing it is a combination of wrong lens and poor focus. Anyway I just had to share my many months of effort and big failure.
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