@astroland
Ohh, #Eratosthenes , one of my favorite craters. You've captured it well.
Here's my best attempt with my #ETX90
@catherineryanhyde
Your equipment is better than mine, and that's a great shot. I'm guessing your scope is bigger than 90mm.
My best is with my little #ETX90
Interesting to compare.
@bendur
I know the feeling. In my youth I never had a big enough telescope with a clock drive for photography. It always seemed too expensive.
Then technology increased dramatically, and I was able to get a discontinued #ETX90 model for $250. Soon after that a web cam to astro camera conversion for about $100. Add a $12 mod to the ETX drive to give a simple fast forward and stop feature , and with that modest collection I obtained this image of Clavious Crater:
@astroland
Ohh, #Eratosthenes , one of my favorite craters. You've captured it well.
Here's my best attempt with my #ETX90
One of the real trouble jobs in #astronomy is collimating a reflector telescope. In particular, Maksutov-Cassegrains, like the ETX90, are tricky.
Fortunately, Escher over Cloudy Nights has posted a really useful guide.
https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/391392-dont-mess-with-etx-collimation/
@macmade
I can't do much about a bad seeing night, but with my home grown software, I toss a few leading frames if necessary to get to a good one. Then when the alignment phase of the software is finished it presents a correlation plot of each aligned frame to the 1st frame.
Here's one of my best of #copernicus crater with this technique and my #ETX90 .
I can then click on the correlation level I'll accept, and all frames whose correlation fall below that level are excluded. That eliminates atmospheric blurring that is momentary. I was particularly happy to see the roughness of the crater floor on one side of the crater.