July 2025

Welcome to Hank’s July 2025 Astrophotography Blog. At the end of June I began the transition from my regular telescope setup, which had a .63 Focal Reducer that turns the telescope’s native 2000 mm focal length into a focal length of about 1200mm; which gives a wider field of view. It also had an Off Axis Guider (OAG) that had a separate little camera on it, that allowed the PHD2 software to “guide” the telescope and keep it locked on a single star. Then it had a filter holder where I kept a filter that blocks out some of the Moonglow and the bright lights of Custer. At the end of the chain was my Mallincam DS10c camera that captures the light. The path of the light coming into the telescope goes from the opening of the telescope tube to the primary mirror at the back of the telescope, bounces back to a secondary mirror at the front of the telescope, and then bounces back again to a hole in the center of the primary mirror that leads to the camera, for a total of about 1200 mm of travel.

The new set up is totally different. Rather than having the focal reducer/OAG/filter holder/camera at the back of the telescope, it has a Hyperstar lens on the front of the telescope, which also has a filter holder and Mallincam camera attached. The path of the light coming into the telescope goes from the opening of the telescope tube to the primary mirror at the back of the telescope, then bounces back to the Hyperstar lens at the front of the telescope and to the camera. The secondary mirror is removed and in its place is the Hyperstar lens, for a total of about 390 mm of travel. A shorter focal length means a wider field of view and a faster capture of light. I also attached a separate guide scope to lock the telescope on a guide star.

The old set up could capture a little over a half of a degree of sky, or about the width of the Moon. The Hyperstar setup can capture about 3 degrees of sky, or about the width of 6 Moons. In summary, the new set up lets me photography bigger targets. Here’s a photo of the new set-up.

The first two photos I took are the East Veil and West Veil Nebulas, and were tests to check out how the new Hyperstar setup was working.

To capture most of the Veil Nebula for one image, I took a 2×2 mosaic (four photos) using my L-Extreme Filter, and joined the four images together in Photoshop. The L-Extreme Filter does not capture red-green-blue light. It gathers mostly just Hydrogen light (and makes it look red) and Oxygen light (and makes it look blue-green). To join the photos the mosaic photo edges have to overlap a bit, and I then dimmed the image on top of the lap a little to show both layers. Then I moved and rotated the images to get the stars to line up on top of one another. To get the images at about the same darkness, I adjusted the contrast.

Here are two more photos. The first is of the largest galaxy in our Local Group, Andromeda. It’s really cool to be able to capture a spiral galaxy and see that kind of detail! It is believed that our own Milky Way Galaxy looks a lot like this! Also check out the two fuzzy spots around Andromeda–they are dwarf satellite galaxies. The second photo is the Crescent Nebula. The constellation Cygnus has lots of cool stuff to check out–like this spooky potato!

Until next month, Clear Skies! -Hank