gorann

You already got some good advice in that thread. Olly talks about investing in a camera with bigger pixels that better matchesthe C11 focal length. It is the Sony A7s (there are other ones in the A7 series but only "s" has the big pixels). You can get a good one for under 1000 Euro on ebay. I bought one there for 900 Euro last year and use it for my Meade 14" (FL 3550 mm) with good results. I also had mine full spectrum modded for another 300 Euro by JTW in Holland, but it works quite well also unmodded (if you modify it it cannot be used for daytime photography).

Thanks a lot Peter!

Thanks a lot Brian!

Thanks and good luck! I will add "Silver Needle" to the post.

Thanks a lot and sorry about the intrusion!

Thanks! It was a new one to me too - forgot now where I found it. Probably just spotted it in Aladin Sky Atlas.

While my previous post was the first light with the Celestron Edge HD 11", this will most likely be the last for the season. It is just getting to bright up here at night and fog is forecasted, but more images to come in August, I hope. I still have data from the 14" Meade to process and I am quite pleased with what I managed to gather this season. NGC4244, aka The Silver Needle Galaxy and Caldwell 26, is an edge-on loose spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is part of the M94 Group or Canes Venatici I Group, a galaxy group relatively close to the Local Group containing the Milky Way. At +10.2v or 10.7B magnitude, NGC 4244 lies approximately 4.1 megaparsecs (14 million light years) away. (All according to Wikipedia) Data: Celestron EdgeHD 1100 with 0.7x reducer (so f/7 and FL 1960mm) with the ASI071 (gain 200) on my Mesu mount. 47 x 5 min, so about 4 hours over two nights.

One user of such a scope, a PlaneWave CDK 24", is Kurious George who frequently post amazing images on Astrobin. He went straight from an EdgeHD8 to that monster-scope. But he then also built himself an obsy on the Californian countryside: https://www.astrobin.com/users/KuriousGeorge/ Also Ola Skarpen & Co has a remote 14.5" RC in Spain (SkyEyE) https://www.astrobin.com/users/olaskarpen/

Hickson 44 (HCG 44) is a group of galaxies in the constellation Leo. As Arp 316, a part of this group is also designated as group of galaxies in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It is a bit embarrasing that my first light with this biggish SCT comes four years after I bought it from OPT in San Diego while I was visiting friends in Anchorage. I brought it back in the check-in luggage (scary!). At least at the time this scope was much cheaper in the US than over here, and that was probably the major reason for why I bought it back then. The scope survived the luggage handling, but I must have been to attached to my refractors since this SCT never ended up on my mount until now. Collimation was essentially spot on from start and I am rather pleased with the first light. Caught over two days as astro darkness is soon gone up here. Data: EdgeHD11" with dedicated 0.7x reducer (= f/7 FL 1960 mm). 105 x 3 min (5.25 hours) with ASI071 at gain 200. One Mesu 200 with Celestron OAG and Lodestar X2.

I started imaging with a 14" Meade LX200R (ACF) on an EQ8 about a year ago and I have been very positively surprised by its performance. On nights with good seeing it certainly delivers more detail on distant galaxies than my Esprit 150 on a Mesu mount in my second obsy. But it needs guiding to be around 0.4 "/pixel for good performance. Yes, the big scope forced me to build a second obsy next to the old one since I realized that there is no way I could get myself to lift the 14" beast (weighs 40 kg) on and off the mount unless absolutely necessary (so far I have not lifted it off). So, with 14" or bigger scopes you don't really have the option of chosing what scope to put onto the pier on an particular night (unless you are a weight lifter). I do have the advantage of a very dark sky (SQM 21.4 - 21.6, so Bortle 2) and I doubt the 14" SCT would be so rewarding to use under light-polluted skies. As pointed out by others here you need a big pixel camera for such a long FL (3550 mm in my case) so I bought a used Sony A7s - a full frame 12 Mbit mirrorless DSLR with 8.3 µm pixels. It is not cooled but I have the advantage of cold nights (sub zero most of the imaging season) helping to suppress noise, and it is then not much more noisy than my cooled ASI cameras. Here is a recent image (7.7 hours at f/10) with the 14" SCT (more to be found on my Astrobin). Cheers Göran

Thanks Dave! Yes, it is lonely isn't it! Does not seem to be many nebulae in that galaxy either (except in the very centre), so we should feel very sorry for all the astrophotographers living in the Black Eye Galaxy. Cannot be much of a galaxy season for them. I am glad they do not know that some of their colleagues over here even call it the Evil Eye Galaxy 😅

Tanks a lot Alan - you are too kind!

Thanks a lot Mark!

Nights are getting really short up here so this image contains all 3.5 hours of darkness that I could catch with my 14" Meade LX200R (on the EQ8) on Thursday night. Fortunately it is still cold (around 0°C) so the un-coled Sony A7s (104 x 2 min at ISO3200) did not produce much noise. SQM of 21.4 also helped. Seems like the Black Eye Galaxy is really a red🤩 Wiki writes "The Black Eye Galaxy (also called Evil Eye Galaxy and designated Messier 64, M64, or NGC 4826) is a relatively isolated spiral galaxy located 17 million light years away in the northern constellation of Coma Berenices." Indeed, I was stuck by the isolation when I processed the image. Any other galaxies in there are very small and fuzzy so clearly much further away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Eye_Galaxy

Thanks Mark! At least it is a rather unusual and rarely imaged object but I find the image a bit on the fuzzy side so I will go for something bigger and hopefully get a more detailed image tonight.

You obviously captured a lot of faint stuff in a relatively short time. Looks very promising Miguel!

A galactic interaction that has been missed in the Arp catalogue. The larger barred galaxy NGC 5297, with a diameter of 150 000 ly, is clearly interacting with NGC 5296, a smaller lenticular galaxy. At least one of the arms appears distorted from the interaction and there is also a faint sream of stars between the galaxies. The galaxies are about 100 million ly away from us in Canes Venatici. This will be one of my final images for the season - astro-darkness is now down to three hours up here. So I collected data over two recent nights, and after throwing away quite a bit due to gusty winds, I ended up with 155 x 2 min subs, so 5.2 hours. Taken with my 14" Meade LX200R and Sony A7s at ISO3200 on the EQ8 mount (Lodestar X2 on a ZWO OAG). This image is cropped as the galaxy is quite small, maybe a bit too small even for my 3550 mm focal length. I will go for something slightly larger tonight if the sky collaborates.

I would seriously consider this one that TS has on sale now: https://www.teleskop-express.de/shop/product_info.php/language/en/info/p6679_TS-Optics-PHOTOLINE-130-mm-f-7-FPL-53-Triplet-APO-Refraktor.html Slightly bigger and much cheaper that the Esprit 120, and I do not know why. It got my attention after seeing what Pete on Astrobin have accomplished with it: https://www.astrobin.com/users/pete_xl/

Thanks to your positive review, even I ordered the pdf, being a stubborn PS user who so far only do cherry picking of PI processes like DBE, SCNR and HDRM. OK, I also do all my callibration and stacking in PI.....

Tack Wim! I changed it to another link that may be more stable. I found this great place to check your recent galaxy shots for supernovae. I now checked all of mine and there were only two😄: http://www.rochesterastronomy.org/snimages/

Thanks James!

Thanks Andrew! By the way this is what the galaxy looked like before the supernova (image from PanSTARRS/DR1), and what my image looks like without the pointers.

I just realized that I had accidentally caught another supernova in a recent image. This time with the Esprit 150 (with ASI071, 75 x 5 min at gain 200). My image was taken 1 April, so only 1 day after its discovery on 31 March. More details about it here: https://wis-tns.weizmann.ac.il/astronotes/astronote/2020-73 Now I have to check more of my recent galaxy data.

I like it a lot and agree with everything said. In addition, I am impressed by the stars - you have avoided the dark rings around them that is often seen in NB images when the star sizes differ between the colour channels. Apparently you managed to match the star sizes perfectly.

Not sure if anyone reads this thread any more, but I just wanted to report that my EQ8 (bought in November 2015) still behaves very nicely, and it has allowed me to get very close to some quite distant galaxies. By coincidence I just saw this video advertizing the more recent EQ8-R, and at the end of the video the seller proudly announces that it is capable if guiding at 0.6"/pixel, and that was with OAG on a 1000mm FL telescope. As long as seeing cooperates I regularly get 0.4"/pixel with my old EQ8 (recent curve attached) even if it is carrying 40 kg of SCT and 40 kg of counterweights. It came with a lot of DEC backlash (I could both see it and feel it when wiggling the saddle), but after I adjusted that according to the manufacturers instructions, I can at least not feel it. Conclusion: if you are lucky enough to have an EQ8 of the old model that performs well there is no reason to upgrade to the EQ8-R. They also had to get rid of the "Freedom-Find" encoders in the new mount to fit in the new cable management. I expect that it may mean less pointing accuracy and maybe leads to the possibility to crash into the pier since the mount no longer knows where it is (but I may have missunderstood this).