Nothing gets by you Rik! I thought it needed some balance.

O.K, no such thing, but at least I got you to look. The two headed beetle is what happens when you forget to delete photos from your last stack in Helicon Focus. ( Double Exposer ) This is a California Root Beetle my son discovered in his swimming pool, which by the way, is an excellent place to fin...

Thank you _K_ . I believe your right.

Wasn't able to find a photo or name of the beetle in California reference's, but sure somebody in this forum can identify it.

Your wisdom hits home. I like to play golf and have a pretty old set of clubs. I often think it would improve my game if I were to buy a new set, but I know it's not the clubs but my technic that has to improve. I suppose the same thing can be said of photography. I'll hold off on the new camera for...

Thank you so much for your help. I can't tell how much I appreciate the input I get from you and others on this forum. Even fully extended to 200mm, I get a very slight amount of vignetting, so to back it off a small amount to infinity would only create more vignetting. For now I can live with it, a...

Aren't I the fool! You were correct regarding light bouncing in. In the " bad " photo, I had a speed light coming in 90% from the side as well as overhead diffused light. Here is a photo I just took with tape removed and side speed light off. This was a stack of 36 shots done quickly. I think I can ...

I'll change diffusion and see what I get. I took a number of photos a few days ago and got the same bad results as posted above. You may be correct regarding directional light. Back to the drawing board!

2020-08-28-19-14-22-(C,Smoothing4)-1.jpg 2020-08-27-23-04-51-(C,Smoothing4)-1.jpg Thanks Rik. Here are before and after photos of Root Beatle antenna segments. All settings were the same using method C rather than A in Helicon. Just sealing the threads on both objective and adaptor made a huge diff...

UPDATE : Problem resolved. After many hours of testing and experimenting I 've come to find out light was leaking in between the adaptor and 200mm lens and objective to adaptor. I wrapped tape around both areas and it seems to have improved by 95%. Tomorrow I'll purchase some plumbers putty and roll...

Yes, it is a DX kit lens. If I back off from full extension, then vignetting only worsens. I suppose I could set it for infinity and crop photo, though not sure that would fix the halo problem. Older 200mm tube lens are not that expensive on eBay. I may go that route.

Thank you Enrico. Your right regarding vibration. I'm going to set everything up for a more solid foundation. Up until this point, what I have has worked well even up to my 4x Am Scope objective, but as I have mentioned before, 10x is a new ball game. I have used both speed light and continuous ligh...

Thank you Marco I just posted a new message before reading your reply. Even when currant lens is fully extended ,I'm getting vignetting in the corners, so finding infinity is out of the question as I understand that is just before the 200 mm is reached. Up until this point, my setup has worked very ...

10x adaptor arrived a few days ago and I've been testing the objective ever since. So far I'm not too happy and think this may just become a paper weight. The one problem I'm having is not being able to overcome is the amount of halo I'm getting. I've looked around on the forum and it seems to be a ...

Just received my adaptor from China to mount my Nikon 10x objective. Like a child , I couldn't to try it out. I notice the images are not as sharp as I had hoped for. As of yet, have not calibrated my 55-200 kit lens to infinity, but feel that it is close. Here are a few questions. 1.How critical fo...