In my opinion, it all seems a bit odd: such short exposures of just 30 seconds with a color camera, and the setup is unusual too: a Schmidt-Cassegrain with a reducer...
And you really need to gather much more light here than for my nebulae shots. Maybe someday I’ll take the risk and try galaxies too.
Nothing unusual, check out the photos in my profile of the "Blue Snowball" and M57, both taken from a red-white zone (essentially Moscow) with exposures of 1" in the first case and 10" in the second. A Schmidt-Cassegrain with a reducer—it's a joy. The light-gathering power is insane (f/2). Compared to an f/5 Newtonian, exposures can be 5–6 times shorter to collect the same amount of light. In factory configuration, these SCTs are called RASA, but there's also the Starizona HyperStar for modifying any Celestron SCT.
Starizona produces more than a dozen correctors for various systems. For Schmidt-Cassegrains, for example, there are reduction options of 0.7x, 0.63x, and 0.4x. But the top-tier option is the HyperStar. For an SCT, the secondary mirror is removed and replaced with this corrector, and the camera is mounted not behind the telescope, but at the front. Depending on the model, the telescope's focal ratio becomes f/1.9 or f/2.0. There are also correctors for Newtonians; for example, one of my instruments is sped up to f/2.2.
20 Oct, 2023
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Have you tried photographing galaxies from Moscow?
And you really need to gather much more light here than for my nebulae shots. Maybe someday I’ll take the risk and try galaxies too.
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