Last weekend I was fortunate enough to be given three clear nights in a row to indulge in this nutty hobby of ours. Furthermore, with its southerly declination at the time, the Moon was not going to be a problem either.
For a change, I used my 500mm cheap f8 telephoto lens + Orion LPR with my modded 350D. As usual, the set up was mounted on my AstroTrac. I often find that, even with the filter, a lot of my shots nevertheless look pretty washed out - sometimes after even only a five minute exposure. I therefore limited to the exposure to 180 secs each - all
NINETY or so of them (plus darks & flats of course). When the AstroTrac had reached the end of the screw thingy & had to be rewound again, I managed to reframe the Rosette again identically to how it was previously (having modified an erect image, right angled 6X30 finder in the hotshoe adapter on my camera has been an absolute godsend). Afterwards I was very glad to see that Deep Sky Stacker didn't have any problems with combining the stacks. Watching all of the frames download from the camera it was great to see that the position of the nebula remained unchanged over each two hour session - testimony to the AT's tracking ability & ease of polar alignment.
Despite the slow f ratio & short exposures, I still managed to capture a good deal of nebulosity - though try as I did, I was disappointed at the lack of colour in the stars despite trying Noels astro tools on the images. Still going by my usual standards I was pleased how this turned out.
Taken on the previous night, this was my first ever attempt at getting the lovely globular M3 in Canes Venatici. It's a composite of 44X150 sec each light frames through the same cheap 500mm f8 lens, fitted with an IDAS LPR with 12 darks & flats as well. Tracked again with my AT and stacked in DSS with further processing in PS & ImagePlus (I used the Digital Development function here).