What in heaven or on earth is that!

If you've taken the time to open this page, or you trying to follow my rambling Astrophotography journey, you will know that I love to experiment, learn, improve, and sometimes fail!

No doubt it falls far short of the standards expected (and would damage my 'virtual reputation' on any other platform), but herein lies one of the great benefits of the astroimaging community - to encourage, learn, support and teach; in my experience Astrobin is no different.

This is a good example of how to push an optical train too far, and also of the extraordinary software that we have at our disposal to convert our raw efforts into something better (at least most of the time). I inserted a 15mm spacer between my Meade f3.3 focal reducer and the camera, to try and reduce the image scale even further, the price excessive vignetting across the entire field!

At 5.4"/px the resolution of my camera is sub-optimal. The seeing was awful with FHMW bouncing about all over the place, high haze leading to star bloat and casting a halo around everything! Good conditions definitely help, but can't make up for a poor optical setup.

Software works its magic on many of our images, to make these acceptable, if not always scientific. Startools is both scientific and a powerful image editor - draging out the detail, and correcting many of the flaws in our optical train and clumsy processing. I've posted this as a gif to show the transformation from the initial pre-processed image after flats have been applied (in Nebulosity v3) and after my best attempt to process and repair in Startools v1.7

I can definitely achieve a wider apparent FOV, whilst maintaining focus and must tweak this to minimise unsightly vignetting and star deformation. An adjustable T-mount adapter will enable me to experiment further, and hopefully optimise my cobbled together 'wide(r)-field' rig.