8" F/2.75 ASA Astrograph Gallery astronomical pictures and astrophotography with a modified Canon 350D and a modified Canon 40D on a 10Micron GM2000 QCI mount, Bulb cable for Canon and Nikon, EQMOD EQDIR cables

More images can be found here

These are the images I made so far with my (N8) 8" or 20cm f/2.75 ASA Astrograph. Most were made in my back garden in the village of Beilen, the Netherlands, some others in the little town of Wateren, were the sky is a bit darker. Some others were made during astrophotography trips to Puimichel in the South of France (Provence).

Starting September 2006 I used a home-modified Canon 350D, the original low pass filter was replaced by a Baader UV/IR filter. From January 2008 I started using a Canon 40D and this camera was modified in april 2008. First tests with the unmodified Canon 40D were made on M45 and comet 17P/Holmes. The ASA Astrograph is performing very well for astrophotography, as you can see in the images, although the corrected field of the astrograph is actually a bit too small for the Canon DSLR chip.

A problem was the fixed pattern noise in the images from the Canon 350D, but the modified Canon 40D looks much better in this respect! The optical speed of the ASA Astrograph is a big advantage if you have only a limited amount of clear nights, the faint fuzzies are recorded much quicker if the f-number of the telescope is low. At the end of February 2008 I upgraded my Losmandy G11 to a 10Micron GM2000 QCI, it's a dream machine and it is performing very well! Usually I can expose for 5 minutes without guiding. At the moment I am experimenting with a Televue Paracorr to be able to work at f/4.8, and I will start using a QSI 583 CCD soon!

In 2010 I used a Takahashi FSQ106 for a while, but from now on I will be mainly using a homebuilt 40cm F/4 Newtonian with Baader MPCC-corrector and the QSI583wsg with Lodestar autoguider.

The latest additions have a red title.
Deep Sky + Comets