Lucky imaging is the next step to high resolution images
Atmosphere is the worst nightmare of the ones, who would like to get hight resolution images. Small telescopes can not have adaptive optics but could benefit of there small aperture and the statistical chance to get a clear view for a fraction of a second. The best fit for this is aperture of 100 - 150 mm. It is like being on the bottom of a pool and looking up. You will see a blurred view but for a fraction of a second you have a chance to get a clear view and you could catch this exact moment.
Generally it should be between 10 milliseconds to 2 second depending on the elevation and the state of the atmosphere.
How to estimate it? Record a video and count how much frames is it take before the image change.
For example if you have a change each 10 frames and you shoot 20 frames per second, then you have half a second clear view and your exposure best be set to 0.5x2/3=0.33s. You could use 0.5s of course, but you will have to discard more frames as you are not sure as the state change will be in sync with the exposure interval. For star system use the lowest exposure that you could and for deep sky the highest.
This is image of Almak with my 3 small telescopes in comparison. You could see the differences of the oprical system and how their diffraction limitation looks like:
Also SharpCap software have live stack functionality that can stack only frames that are above predefined focus quality FWHM. Witch is best for deep sky. This one is taken under bad seeing conditions due to wind:
Here is Jupiter with Vixen VMC 110L. No post-processing
The best thing is that you do not need precise equatorial mouth or autogiding to do that. You need a high speed, low noise, high QE camera that is now becoming cheeper as the advance of the sensor development. More on this topic will come this year as this will be the primary development of my largest telescope SW200pds!
While cleaning up my PC I found sequences of shots of Virgo galaxy cluster taken during springs of the last 2 years. Those were attempts to shot this object, but I was not satisfied with the result and left them.
I recently bought a pocket spectroscope for laboratory use. You can find it at Ali for 5$. It is with glass prism and well build. So I did some test to use with a telescope but did not
http://www.deepskywatch.com/deep-sky-hunter-atlas.html This is an amazing resource. Detailed atlas of all the sky with NGC and IC objects.
Reading a new product that claims to be 100x time more powerful then conventional telescope, I realise that this is just an astrograph with a digital camera that is doing stacked images and show them trought eyepiece or App.
I am so impressed with the K5 ability to quickly gather signal from nebulas (Quantum efficiency) and galaxies, so I decide to take one more K5 and to remove the IR-cut Filter of the old one.
