Shot this last night from my driveway. Going against all the standard norms for photographing nebula, I used my 2x Barlow on my 82ED Evolux refractor. Pushed my f/stop up to whopping f/13.3 on an 82mm refractor, talk about your slow scope. I read a lot about faster scopes and slower scopes. No such thing. Maybe back in the day when guys were shooting with film and couldn't electronically guide their scopes like we can now, and had to stand behind the eyepiece and manually guide their exposure like I did my M8 shot. Stood for over an hour staring at one star maintaining it on a crosshair with small adjustments to dec and RA myself. With today's equipment that can guide with sub-arc-second accuracy does the f/ratio of the scope really matter. Maybe for faint deep sky large nebula but I don't see the need for small bright targets such as M1, M57, and most of the Messier galaxies. I mean just expose a longer sub, I see guys shooting 10 min subs and more. I routinely now shoot 5min subs with my new AM5 mount in my bortle 6 skies, which 30 years ago would have been unheard of. I know my comments about scope speed will probably be met with ire, but really given the image I'm posting do you really think for bright targets, "speed" or the illusion of it really matters. Anyway hope you like my image, and be kind in the comments about my speed issue
lol
Oh and this was processed with no darks. Like my good friend Jeff Kisslinger
https://www.astrobin.com/users/Kisslija/ who suggested not to shoot them any longer because they really don't make a difference, that saved about 90mins of shot time I devoted to the lights, and I don't know how they would have helped. Again going against the norms of astrophotography.
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