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Canon Vintage Lens goes Astro - Messier 44, Walter Leonhard Schramböck

Canon Vintage Lens goes Astro - Messier 44

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)
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Canon Vintage Lens goes Astro - Messier 44, Walter Leonhard Schramböck

Canon Vintage Lens goes Astro - Messier 44

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

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Description

Messier 44, "the beehive" - an open star cluster in the constellation Cancer.
Here I tried out my old vintage photo lens on an astro camera. The lens is a Canon FD 50mm f 1:1.4 S.S.C., the camera used was the ZWO ASI183MC-Pro.
In order to be able to use this camera including the filter on this lens, I had to make an adaptation that achieved the back focus of 42mm.
As expected, the vintage optics cannot be used with an open aperture in the starry sky; here it shows strong coma tendencies towards the edges. Only when stopped down to f/4.8 do the stars remain reasonably round up to the edge of the sensor and show few chromatic aberrations.
For this particular image, the weather conditions were unforgiving, with only six individual exposures of 120s proving cloud-free when reviewed.
This rather old piece of glass did quite well, so it's definitely useful when I need a particularly wide field of view in the sky.

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