At some point in an amateur astrophotographer’s journey, you reach a plateau. You may find that you’ve imaged most common targets, perfected processing techniques, and mastered your equipment. Unless you’re willing to travel to a different hemisphere, everything begins to feel like a familiar old friend compared with the excitement of a brand new relationship.
Some of us find new energy by purchasing a longer focal length scope to image smaller targets, only to discover unexpected challenges due to poor seeing, imperfect collimation, and the need for off-axis guiding, not to mention limited portability.
Others go in the direction of forgoing amateur equipment entirely and instead processing data captured by professional astronomers using ground-based observatories or space telescopes. Still others have gone to wider fields of view (FOV), using large CCD chips like the KAF-16803, along with a high-quality apochromatic telescope.
This is the approach I’ve taken in my evolution as an amateur astrophotographer over the past two decades, in order to gain a greater appreciation of target size — especially when it comes to large, sprawling nebulae.
In recent years, I’ve enjoyed using a Takahashi FSQ-106 apochromatic refractor, which has a focal length of 530mm and yields a respectable field of view of 4° at image scales in the range of 3.5" per pixel. But, recently, I’ve pushed things even further to capture very wide-field views of nebulae and star fields in the Milky Way. I’ve taken a hybrid approach, employing an even wider field of view obtained using an inexpensive, high-quality Pentax lens as a canvas upon which to repurpose some of my prior, higher resolution images. I’ve found that this offers a new perspective on familiar targets by showing how they relate to one another in the night sky.