I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my time taking astrophotographs using my Sky-Watcher Esprit 100 f/5.5 apo refractor, ZWO ASI533MC Pro camera, and iOptron GEM45 mount over the past several months. The Sky-Watcher has been a joy to use, yielding sharp views in a field of view that works well for nebula and other larger targets. But with the onset of spring, most of the best targets in the night sky are galaxies–spectacular, but smaller. So I decided it was time to give my Celestron NexStar 6SE a try. Not the mount, mind you–it’s an alt-az mount with a lot of backlash in the motor drives–just the optical tube assembly (OTA). The C6 is a 150-mm f/10 with decent optics. A 1500-mm focal length seemed like quite a challenge for imaging, though, so I added the Celestron 0.63x focal reducer to the mix.

This year Santa brought me a new Optolong L-Extreme narrow-band filter to use with my also-new ZWO ASI533MC Pro one-shot-color camera. I recently had the chance to try out this new combination for the first time, choosing the Rosette Nebula in the constellation Monoceros as my first target.

One of the gifts I received for my 60th birthday was a dedicated astronomy camera–the ZWO ASI533MC Pro. One of my first targets for this new camera was the Orion Nebula.