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Well had to battle clouds for most of the night, so played around with a small refractor.... here are a couple of so so shots and 1 pic of the setup I was using..

Wow Big V, this is just right up my alley...

Very nice pin-point stars at the frame's edges, what kind of scope where you using? You said refractor (sure looks like it) - which one? I can't ID it from the photograph.

You might want to find a good pure white star to WB on, the images seem a bit magenta-laden. It doesn't look like CA, though.

For how long did you expose?

Thanks for posting and keep it coming!

Cheers
Steffen.

Steffen, just a 5 inch chinese el chepo refractor and that is CA you are seeing, the stars were crisp to the edge but these scopes are no where near apochromatic...I normally use a schmidt cass
The exposures were only 1 min long because there was so much cloud about..had to shoot through the holes

i can never get enough of astrophotography... great job.

roughly what sort of $$$ are we talking for a rig setup like that... ?

cheers

xerubus, the blue scope was about 480 dollars, the white scope 400 dollars, the mount was 1100 dollars the guider holding the white scope was 500 dollars. This gear is a combination of friends, so we have shared the cost...The advantage of this setup is that it provides autoguiding of the stars and we can mount any camera/lens/scope we want on it..this means we can shoot hi res or wide field. Last night was too cloudy to do any real photography but was the first night out with the new system, so more of a proof of concept that it all works. We are replacing the blue scope with an apochromatic one - read lots of dollars for that - but that will give us pin point stars free of coloured blobs and better contrast...

The Orion Nebula pic you posted is my pic of choice.. its an awesome shot..

How long have you been doing this type of photography?

Tim

Zeeke, have been doing it seriously since 1998, using a variety of scopes and cameras...

This is an example of what I have done in the past with high resolution set up.

don't know a thing about stars [except for the southern cross and the two pointers] but even i can see the horse head in the last pic