Samples

Here's a couple samples to show how well the LX10 works with an autoguider. I have a whole photo-album full of great pictures, and some year I'll have the time to scan and post them. In the meantime, here's a few samples that show how good the tracking can be with the autoguider/LX10 combination. These photos were chosen specifically because they demonstrate good tracking, not for aesthetics (ie, no Orion Nebula or Andromeda Galaxy yet. At this scale they would be about twice as wide as the screen and take forever to download).

Other than basic brightness/contrast/color adjustments, no digital enhancement was done (in particular, no sharpening).

M16-The Eagle Nebula

I needed to use an f/6.3 focal reducer to find a guide star in good position for this one (one diadvantage to the 201 autoguider-it's not cooled so it's not very sensitive on warm nights, which can make it difficult to find a guide star. In hindsight, I would recommend the 208, which is cooled and can also be used as an imager, in case you also want to try CCD imaging). The resulting image came out so sharp at the reduced f/6.3 scale that my cheap scanner couldn't quite do it justice. The original print has sharp boundaries between the dark "eagle" and the surrounding red nebula. Maybe I'll need to get a 5X7 or 8X10 print made and then scan that. The dark "eagle" in the center of this image appeared as the famous "Pillars of Creation" Hubble image, one of the first images released after the scope's optics were corrected. This image shows an area about 22X23 arcminutes. 45 minute exposure at f/6.3 on Fuji 800 film.

M1-The Crab Nebula

This object is small so I used a 2X converter on the camera to double the image scale. That means the guiding has to be extra good, since the off-axis image going to the guider is still at the original (f/10 prime focus) scale, and any guiding errors are doubled by the converter on the film. This image covers only about 5X5 arcminutes. Exposure 90 minutes at f/20 on Kodak Royal Gold 1000 film.

M51-The Whirpool Galaxy

I scanned this image to try a method of combining multiple scans to reduce scanner noise. It seemed to help, but then I boosted the contrast a bit, and the noise ("snow") showed up again. 1 hour exposure at f/10 on Fuji 800 film.

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