Enclosing my first astrophoto. I am starting with the lunar surface as recommended to me. Would appreciate constructive criticism as I have no mentor I can turn to. Photo is attached.

This was shot Sony Cyber Shot DSC-S60 mounted to my Celestron Nexstar 8 GPS through 40mm Celestron eyepiece with camera in full zoom. Camera mounted via Orion digital camera mount.

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Dsc00779.jpg (146.2 KB, 67 views)

Excellent first photo! Thanks for posting. Hope we see morre.

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Your on the right track!Lunertic, great shot for a starter keep them coming in.

Great picture, I thought I'd feature it today. Keep them coming.
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Fantastic first shot and cogratulations on being featured! Hope tosee much more from you.

Kind regards
Matt

Thanks all for the kind words. If anyone has suggestions on what I can do to improve my work I would appreciate any help. I retired to a small Arkansas community in the Ozarks, but so far haven't come across others into amateur astronomy. Is there anyway to reduce the over exposure without losing details in the other areas? Filtering?

There are three main difficulties you must overcome in good planetary photography, vibration, focus and seeing.

Vibration comes from touching the camera while taking a picture. Use the delay feature so as much vibration as possible will subside before the photo is taken, or better yet, if the camera supports it use a remote trigger. I didn't look up the camera but if it is a DSLR mirror flop is a source of vibration and the mirror must be up long before the shutter is triggered.

Focus of a digital camera can be a real problem, the view screen, even in zoom mode, is way too small to tell when you are in focus. If you can feed the image to a TV screen that will help a lot. Some find a Hartmann mask useful. This is just a mask over the front of the scope with two holes at 180 degrees at the edge of the objective. 1" or slightly larger work fine. Using a star you will see two images of the star when out of focus. Adjust the focus until you see only one at the highest zoom you can get. Then slew to the moon and take the photo. A bright mountain top surrounded by dark at the terminator works as well. While you can buy such a mask you can make one out of the side of a cardboard box. There's nothing precise about the mask, two holes of about the same size (or three) well separated near the outside edge of the objective is all that's needed. Round, triangular or irregular holes all work fine. Remove it after focusing of course.

Seeing you have little control over. With a digital camera you just take many photos and use the best of the bunch hoping to catch one when seeing is steady and matches the focus you're set at.

For best planetary work a web cam helps because it can take hundreds of shots in a short time. These can be stacked in K3CCDTools or Registax with the software picking out the best frames to use and align. If the scope drifts some that actually helps resolution using this method. Tutorials are available on the net.

Right now you are using afocal imaging. If you can remove the lens and use the scope as the lens using barlow or eyepiece projection that is best as it gives you a lot more control and removes a lot of lenses that only degrade the image.

For now stick with what you have until you have reached the point you are getting everything out of it you can then think about improving the camera.

Your first moon shot is a lot better than mine was so you are off to a good start!

There is no best way to take an astro photo. There are just too many ways of doing it to pick one. You have to experiment and find what works best for you and hone it. Only after getting that down should you move to something new. Also only change one thing at a time. If you change more you don't know which one helped! Indeed, maybe one actually helped but was masked by the other that hurt even more. You just don't know unless you work with one change at a time. And give that more than one chance. Sometimes you just have a off day and nothing is working.

At least with today's digital camera's experimentation is cheap. I went through hundreds of dollars of film and developer honing my skills.

As to over exposure, I gather you used the auto exposure setting, it was confused by all the dark. Use manual if possible, if not, see if it has different options for how the frame is sampled for the exposure, try moving the object around in the field to hit the sweet spot of the system.

The moon has a wide range of brightness from a dim terminator to a bright limb, especially by quarter moon and later. If the camera supports RAW with its 12 bit image rather than 8 bit of jpeg it will allow you to dig into the dim regions and suppress the bright during processing. Using higher power to isolate one region also helps though may slow the exposure to where seeing is more of a problem. The faster the shutter the less time seeing has to screw up the image. Its quite a compromise and you'll have to experiment to find what works best for your camera. Filters won't help. Though experiment with the ISO setting to see what gives the least noise with a fast enough exposure to freeze seeing. Achromatic refractors often are helped with a yellow filter to isolate one color but that isn't a problem with an SCT.

Image when the object is highest in the sky. When low you get a lot of distortion and chromatic aberration from the atmosphere.

I'm sure I've missed a few points but this is what hit me right off.

Rick

that looks great to me. Thanks for the recommendation of the mount. I've been looking for something like that.

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Thanks, Rick, for the very helpful suggestions. This is the kind of critique I needed.

Clear skies to all!