First Light with my Astro-modded Camera and Narrowband Filter

My recent acquisition for doing astrophotography is a Canon 800D DSLR camera body which I had modified for astro work. Now I am a Nikon user and it pained me to buy a Canon camera, particularly when I have two older Nikon bodies which could have been used.  However, three factors influenced my decision to buy a Canon body. Firstly, it is ridiculously expensive to have a Nikon camera modified for astrophotography in the UK and very few places do it. Secondly, neither of my old Nikons have a swivel screen and I have found having this on my D500 invaluable.  But I'm not going to have that body modded as it's my main birding camera. Thirdly, I know several people who use this model of camera to good effect and it's still a current model.

The modification involves removing the infra red (IR) filter (which is fitted to most new cameras) in order to make it more sensitive to the Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) wavelengths of light.  Many deep sky objects emit Ha light and normal DSLRs find it difficult to image these wavelengths.

In addition, I recently bought an Optolong L-eNhance narrowband filter to cut out unwanted light-pollution from houses, street lights and the moon as well as improving the contrast of Ha emission nebulae.  But when I took some initial shots with it on my unmodified Nikon camera, I realised it wasn't going to work well.  So I ended up buying a second hand camera body to have modified for increased sensitivity.

This session was my first attempt at using both the filter and modded camera together, and I have to say I am pretty pleased with the results.

My first target was NGC 2244, the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monocerous near to Orion. Although the initial image didn't look like this, I could definitely see the red Ha light faintly on the back of the camera and processing it in PhotoShop CC brought out these details.  It is a single shot of 7 minutes duration at ISO 800 on an HEQ5 Pro tracking mount. I didn't use guiding and so the stars are amazingly round for this duration of shot.

Later I took this shot of IC 1805, the Heart Nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia and, although I should have used a focal reducer to get the whole image in the frame, I am pleased with my first attempt. The exposure was the same for the Rosette Nebula as described above.

With these two successful targets under my belt I am now keen to get guiding going and do some stacked sets of shots to hopefully bring out more fine detail and perhaps some more colours.  I'll also be using a focal reducer on both of them next time.