I finally caught up in the world of digital astrophotography with the purchase of a Nikon D50 DSLR (digital Single Lens Reflex) camera. This is my first experience with DSLR astrophotography. I'm still a bit new to this, but I am pleased with the results thus far.

Lunar Eclipse Feb 20, 2008. Click the thumbnail to see a gallery of photos.

Full moon, prime focus at f/6.3, reduced by the Lumicon Giant Easyguider.

Full moon, shot through a 500mm telephoto lens, piggyback. Digital stack of 22 photos. Poor quality I believe is due to this being a really cheap lens.

Mosaic created with three sets of 5 exposures stacked.

Prime focus shot, experimenting mostly.

Eyepiece projection through a 10mm orthoscopic eyepiece. This is a single frame.

Eyepiece projection thru a 10mm ortho eyepiece. This si a stack of 5 images. I think the webcam does a much nicer job at lunar photos.

This was my first attempt at a fully-processed DSLR photo. I think I went way overboard on the processing. I lost a lot of the color in the stars, and I pushed the color balance too far, and lost the natural colors. It's a decent shot for my first attempt, and sure looks a lot better than my best M27 on film. This is a single exposure, no stacking.

This is the untouched version of the photo above. Notice the red amp noise in the top right corner- that must be subtracted using a dark frame. Even though this image is much lighter than the one above, it has the more natural colors in the nebula, and you can definitely see the color in the surrounding stars much better.

My first photo that I am actually happy with. I finally got the autoguider working to my satisfaction. The stars are much more round- some are a bit egg-shaped because I don't have the dec backlash setting quite right on the scope yet, but I'm still happy with the results. This image is composed of (1) 5-minute shot, (8) 2-minute shots, (5) 1-minute shots and (5) 30-second shots. Each group was digitally stacked, the dark frame subtracted (hot pixels and amp noise), then I stacked each group together, and did some basic processing. This nebula is a bit larger than what's in the shot, so I'm going to try shooting at f/6.3 next time. My off-axis guider has a reducing lens, and depending on where I put it, I can go from f/10 down to 6.3, 5.5 or 3.3. Anything lower than 6.3 has really bad vignetting, tho so I avoid them.

This is the trapezium of M42. This is the stack of five 30-second shots used in the photo above.

Single exposure of the ring nebula, M57.

This is a stack of five exposures of the ring nebula.

This is a 5 minute exposure of M13, the Hercules Cluster.

This is a 1-minute exposure of M13.

For how popular a target M31 is, I have yet to get a decent shot of it. This is a stack of four 5-minute shots. Looks like I need a lot more than that.

This is a stack of six 5-minute shots of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Looks like I need a lot more than that.

This was more of an experiment than anything else. I was just trying to see if my autoguider would work better with less movement. Anyway, this is a 5-minute shot of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. I will try and get a better shot of it down the road.