I goofed last night.....but recovered something.....

[pyrasanth]

With the moon really bright but otherwise a nice night I wanted to image M81 & M82 with the RASA & Atik 11000 to see what results I could get. Hence my choice to do a test with a HA filter because HA is not so affected by the bright moon.

So with this in mind I set up the capture and began taking subs. I reached 12 subs & did a quick stack & calibration to review my ongoing progress. The calibration looked horrible & the targets were simply lost in the background. This I could not understand.

Well it seems that I'd set up a HA capture but put the wrong filter in the telescope. I was shooting with a UVCUT filter & not a HA hence the awful calibration results from the flats.

The conditions were not ideal with the moon & some very thin cloud wafting around.

Now normally I would never shoot L under a bright moon & particularly with a telescope as fast as the RASA but I said oh sugar & carried on with the capture. I stacked 53 3 minute subs under a bright moon & calibrated with the correct flat & a new 3 minute dark. The result is below but would have been much better with no bright moon. Let me know what you think as always.

[MarsG76]

You actually said "oh sugar"???

Very nice result for a IR cut full moon night capture, I would have thought that the subs would be overexposed within 3 minutes, but there you go.

[pyrasanth]

You actually said "oh sugar"???

Very nice result for a IR cut full moon night capture, I would have thought that the subs would be overexposed within 3 minutes, but there you go.

The 3 minute subs were the intended HA exposure so perhaps they were a bit over exposed for UVCUT. I did have to tweak the exposure in Photoshop as the cores were burnt out. I could have cancelled the session & reset the exposure but lazily I just kept running.

I did say something stronger than sugar....but family forum & rules............