The first-ever "real" astroimage with the Nighthawk.

On 8 June 2005 I received my Stellarvue NightHawk refractor. I had to wait some days until I received some adapters from 2" to T2 thread. The night from 17 to 18 June 2005 was clear, but some strong winds were a bit problematic. Nights do not become dark here at this time of a year. So it was still very bright. Visually M57 was just there in a 20mm LV eyepiece. Nevertheless I have tried to take a series of images.

D70 settings were: 30 seconds and 500 ISO. This is a combination of 10 images. No dark frame and flat fields taken !

Full frame image. Some astigmatism can be seen at the corners and the sides. The marking shows the field I have cropped out.

This is the same field as above after treatment with IRIS (DDP) and ImagePlus (Smoothing). Here you see as well the amp glow of the D70.

Here is now a full size crop out of the above image. It shows a lot of stars already. Also the center star of M57 Ring Nebula is faintly visible.

This small crop shows some magnitudes already available in the image.

Note that there is some false colour around the brighter stars. I am very excited about the depth of the field already. I am looking forward to next autumn when it gets darker...


A 2 second Jupiter image. It was still very bright at that time with moonlight also present.