First Light!...

  Well for Christmas last year (2011), my mother had some spare cash and she said I could have anything I wanted.  Wanting a new telescope for ages, one with a bit of kick to it, I asked for a Skywatcher 200P Dobsoian.  It's a huge bugger, I really wasn't expecting it to be as big as it was!  but I really do love the thing.  If you look at the pictures below you can see the difference.

This is from my 3" Newtoian scope.

This is from my new 8" Dob (25mm Wide EP)

 My 8" Dob with an 10mm EP

See the difference? I know the pictures aren't that great, but that's because I used a mobile phone held to the eyepiece.  I believe it's called afocal photography, and it's bloody hard when you are cold, holding a phone to an eyepiece while trying to hit the button to take a picture.  I took the below picture in the same method to see what I could do, not this is not going to win me any prizes.  But you can see what can be done with basic equipment, and this zoomed in a fair bit, so please excuse the pixels, and I am sure you can work out what it is supposed to be.

I've have since ordered some new bits to help with some semi-decent pictures.  I ordered a Skywatcher Universal camera adaptor, a Light Pollution Reduction filter, the book "Making Every Photon Count" by Steve Richards and a Fuji Finepix S2950 bridge camera, I know it's a bridge camera, but it should be good enough for a few pictures surely??!!  Everything mentioned above is linked to where I got the stuff from by the way.  All of the telescope stuff was purchased from First Light Optics, a great place to order stuffs from, can't recommend them enough.  They also support Stargazers Lounge too, which is a great place to get advice from about this kinda stuff. :)

  PEACE!

  Dazz