Hello Everyone I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Jeff and I am from Halifax, NS Canada and I just bought Pixinsight after using the trial for a few months. I grew up with this hobby primarily as a solo visual observer, with over 20 years of visual observing under my belt I wanted to see if AP would be an interest and sure enough it is! I started with a Neximage taking pics of the moon and planets and Comets (Holmes). I wanted more, I wanted to take wide field. I used mainly a point and shoot Canon SD750 taking many exposures of 15 seconds each and attempting to stack them. There is alot of noise with a point and shoot.
I now want to start taking serious images of DSOs of all types. I was always intrigued by it and I asked for a Canon Rebel EOS T1i (500D). Started taking wide-field shots of Orion, Pleiades, Auriga with ok results. The star-trailing really annoyed me even on short exposures. I then begged for an Orion F4 8" Astrograph for Christmas and I actually got it, thanks to my wife. I had an old EQ5 I used to try it out visually. A member of the Halifax RASC (thanks Blair) lent me a T Adapter and I tried it out with my 12" Skywatcher Collapsible Dob. It was absolutely STUNNED at the quality I could pick up with a Dob that wasn't tracking the stars. Yeah there was massive star trails but there was color in M42! I hooked up my Orion to the EQ5 one cold night to try M42 again, I was again amazed at the quality from an unguided/undriven mount, but that wasn't enough! It was too heavy for my little EQ5 and I asked for Gift cards to Atlantic Photo Supply in Halifax to get a Celestron CGEM and a Celestron Nexguide and I just picked that up on the weekend and played a bit with setup as it has been cloudy for weeks it seems. Thankfully I will be able to "hopefully" try on All Star Align tomorrow night for a bit to familiarize myself with the new mount then I will need to try out the ADM guidescope package, when I get an aluminum drill bit.
I can't wait to get started in this AP hobby and I can't wait to share it all with the community.
- Jeff
PS.. I received the download link with my Username and a password thats all ---------------------. So I can't download it needless to say. Do I have to highlight specific -'s to reveal the hidden password?
