Cygnus Wide Field


While shooting “deep sky” objects with the telescope at the 2011 Oregon Star Party, I had a second rig set up to shoot wide areas of the sky with a 35mm lens on a DSLR camera. It didn’t work quite as well as I had hoped. I think the main problem is that with such a dense field of stars you need higher resolution to avoid becoming just a gray area. I did several such shots and this is probably the best one because it includes a lot of hydrogen nebulous regions (the red). If you know where to look, a lot of the objects shot through the telescope can be found here, including the North American and Pelican Nebulae, the Crescent Nebula, the Sadr region, and the Veil Nebula.

 Scope: Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 (at f/2.8)
Mount: Vixen GP2
Camera: Canon XT
Exposure: 30 x 120 seconds (1 hr total)


About Greg Marshall

I am a retired electronics engineer and after a few months of enjoying my leisure I began to miss doing product development. My astronomy hobby always needed new solutions to unique problems, so I decided that whenever I came up with a good solution I would try to make it available to others.

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