Deep Sky Astrophotography by Frans Kroon Latest Pictures

LATEST PICTURES

First light with my new SBIG ST-8300C.
In the beginning of august 2010 we visited Les Granges in Southern France. We had three good nights. The conditions were good as you can also see on the website of Maurice Toet (he made pictures with the ST-8300M) and Robert Koornwinder.
All exposures were made with my new ST-8300C on the TEC140 with fieldflattener. The results are a bit disappointing. A relative bright object as M16 seems to be good, but dimmer objects as NGC7023 or M74 are not good compared to the exposures I made from the same objects one year ago with my modified DSLR Canon 40D (see below this page). I had to stretch the exposures very strong to see at least something (in ImagesPlus the Break-Point 0-65535 to 0-500).
I stacked many exposures of 10 minutes, which were calibrated with bias, dark and flat field frames, but the result is very noisy. The Helix nebulae (140 minutes) looks good as a small picture, but zoomed in the result is noisy and not better then a picture of 64 minutes (8x8) I made a few years ago with my Canon 20Da and a 10 cm Vixen telescope.

M16

NGC7293

NGC7023

M74

In the first week of february 2010 I visited Les Granges in Southern France. Three nights were clear but not perfect. And it was cold. I discovered that my Canon 40D (in the coldbox) stopped functioning at -16° C. These three exposures were made with my TEC140 with the new field flattener.

B33

M78

NGC2174

From 22 - 29 august 2009 I visited Les Granges in Southern France, together with Maurice Toet and Robert Koornwinder.
We had four good nights. All exposures were made with the TEC140 (without fieldflattener).