Yes, it is possible to get a DSO image from a Dobsonian scope without an equatorial platform for tracking, but I wouldn’t want to have to do it too many times! lol.
Keeping the object in the field of view is tough. Dealing with hundreds of images and only 25% are usable is a pain. Plus, you have to manually pick and sort them, which is even worse. And after all that effort, you get such meager results like the above? Yeah, like I already said… I wouldn’t want to do this more than I have to. 🙂
Here’s a rework of an image with data from higher resolution images overlayed on a base image that was taken with my 200mm F/2.8 Canon telephoto lens. The overlay images were closeups of M8 and M20 taken with the TV-85 telescope.
I was shooting Comet Lovejoy and this event was going down before midnight, so I slewed over and caught some images of it.
The Canon kit lens that came with my camera sat unused for so long, I figured I should at least test it a bit for astro use. This is the second time I used it. But, no matter how hard I tried, the focus was never very good and I had to repair the misshapen stars in Photoshop.
A bright moon precludes imaging dim nebula or galaxies, but not open clusters. Here’s one in Cassiopeia I’ve not imaged in quite some time, if ever.
It has been so long since I imaged with the C8 I forgot how big a globular would look in it. To satisfy my curiosity, I shot M15 at the start of my imaging session on Nov 29, 2014. I had to crop out the distortion in the corners, so this is roughly a 60% crop of the central region.
I had time to kill while waiting for Orion to get into position, so I shot 40 x 2 minute sub-images of the Pleiades at ISO 3200. I did not spend much time in post processing this, but it came out half-decent regardless.
A bright moon precluded shooting any dim deep sky objects (DSO’s.) Star cluster are still viable targets, though. I had time to kill so I picked the most photogenic star cluster(s) to shoot – the Double Cluster.
Here’s 3.3 hrs of data on two NGC objects, 6939 and 6946, that happen to be side-by-side in the sky. Conditions were decent and I was able to get plenty of sub-images.
Two globular clusters in Aquila and a very tiny comet are visible in this image. I only wanted to check the size of Comet Jaques on this night, since I missed imaging it when it was at it’s best. I regret that I did not get a chance to shoot it back then, but at least I finally got to see it.