8 | ASTROPHOTOGRAPHY
Getting Sirius
Nathan Peplow upgrades his existing kit for incredible results of the night sky
So far I’ve tried most types of photography, but I wanted to do something entirely different. I’d previously shot astrophotography images such as basic star trails and Milky Way shots. I’d even brought a little iOptron sky tracker camera mount, but then I wanted to go bigger.
The Elephant’s Trunk
This is a concentration of ionised gas and dust - appropriately named due to its appearance. I took this with my Moravian G2-4000 and Altair 115 APO scope, with narrowband filters using the classic Hubble Palette colour profile: Hydrogen Alpha, Oxygen III and Sulphur II. It’s comprised of seven 10-minute exposures of each channel. The focal length with the reducer was 635mm at f/5.5.