gorann

PS. If you invert you image and darken it a bit the probably Monogem ring becomes quite apparent and it looks like you have about half of it in you image:

As far as I know there are no images of the whole Monogem ring, so you are pioneering here. I am amazed that you managed to capture such clear Oiii structures already after an hour. If I was you I would be tempted to capture a few more hours of this apparent ring structure that in your image appears to encircle the PN Hu 6. Keep up the good work on your amazing project!

Your promising image reminded me that I should reprocess my image of this object from two years ago using the new XT tools. It was 12 hours of RASA 8 data using the IDAS NBZ filter on an ASI2600MC. This is a great NB object, so I suggest that you put your L-extreme filter on next time to get to all that Oiii and Ha. As you see, there is also a lot of Ha in the neighborhood if you go deep enough, so adding subs pay off. Cheers & CS, Göran

Really intriguing structures Alex! I think that what you have caught may be parts of an enormous SNR called the Monogem ring. I once caught just a little part of it near Dreyers Nebula. You can read a bit about it on my Astrobin post (https://www.astrobin.com/yzuvc3/B/), and a subsequent news item in Astronomy Now. I suggest you contact Marcel Drechsler that could give some more insight. What equipment did you use to catch the image? Cheers, Göran

great news Steve! Will you put the heater back on? Maybe use a separate power source for it.

Really nice! Getting that blue out in this object is a challenge! Using Ha as Lum, as suggested, is usually a bad idea and as you say it turns everything salmon coloured, In this case it would really suppress your blue signal.

Thanks Olly! Would be nice if it is a unrecognized SNR😃

Last night I got my first proper light with my EdgeHD11 with Hyperstar v4, which compared to my RASA8s can fit in a filter drawer so I can easily change filters (and of course it has twice the light grasp of a RASA8). I put in a Baader 4 nm Oiii f/2 filter and aimed at the mysterious blue object I discovered in Cassiopeia about a month ago (https://www.astrobin.com/cnvp2s/). I then imaged it with RASA8 and an IDAS NBZ dual-band filter (Ha+Oiii) so it was likely a Oiii emitting object, but that filter also let some blue reflection nebulosity through (especially with a light bucket as a RASA). So with the Hyperstar I wanted to make sure it was Oiii the object was emitting. Unforunately I only got 6 x 5 min before clouds moved in. However, for this 11" f/1.9 scope that was enough to reveal a clear Oiii signal, although a bit noisy. When I posted my RASA image Marcel Drechsler enlightened me that the object was registered in Simbad as GSH 122+02-77 "Interstellar Shell" (http://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=GSH+122%2B02-77&submit=SIMBAD+search) with no further info and it has apparently never been imaged. At least we can now be quite sure it is emitting a significant amount of Oiii. Marcel has just sent this and my previous image to Prof. Robert Fesen at Dartmouth College in the US for evaluation - could possibly be a new SNR, I keep my fingers crossed. Surprisingly, the Hyperstar v4 with a APS-C camera was producing good enough corner stars right out of the box (although I bought it second hand) and the small deformations was easily taken care of by BlurXT2. A tri-Bahtinov mask I put on last night gave a quite symmetric spike pattern, suggesting no collimation is needed (I have the Hyperstar in a fully screwed in position). That was a big releif. Camera used was a QHY268MM, all on an EQ8 in an obsy next to my dual-RASA8 rig (I will definitively not stop using that). Cheers, Göran Here is the Hyperstar Oiii image from last night: And the RASA IDAS NBZ image from February:

Congrats Steve! My history and feelings about SGL are very similar to yours. I now realize that I missed my 5000 milestone - but it must have happened not long ago.

Great! Hopefully air fright so it does not get blown up on the way to the Suez canal😆

By the way, for the autumn I was thinking of the possibility of making side-by-side dual mount of this, I just love doubling the data, by putting an Esprit 100 next to it. I think the EQ8 should be able to handle this (it handled my 40 kg Meade 14" just fine) and the field of view are virtually the same for these scopes (540 mm for Hyperstar and 550 mm for Esprit). I could then collect RGB with an AIS2600MC on the Esprit and NB with the big fellow. I got all the stuff just need to put it together. But for now it will only be the Hyperstar.

It is a bit of both. Mirror flop is no problem if I remember to tighten the mirror lock screws after focusing. With regard to temperature my RASA8 can take about 3°C without losing focus but more than that will start affecting focus. My guess is that the whole steel tube expands / contracts. With an ordinary SCT at f/10 (so more focus depth), temperature will probably have less effect.

I had a look in the HASH database of PNs and I cannot find it there (maybe you also looked there?): http://202.189.117.101:8999/gpne/dbMainPage.php?viewfirst=6&ipp=100

I think I just wait until the next clear night and take it from there. If I need to refocus now and then I will just do it and I always do it after a flip. The need for refocus will of course depend on how steady the temperature is and I will use the mirror locks between focusing, but that will not allow autofocus (which I in any case never used). What has surprised me and other RASA users is how good they maintain focus, so I hope my Hyperstar set up will behave similarly. Is the smaller scope you talk about a Hyperstar?

Good question. Unfortunately, to find out I will have to wait until clouds disappear and it looks like it will take a while. Frustrating!

Thanks Elp! Yes, I know someone using a full frame sensor with it (https://www.astrobin.com/users/equinoxx/) but I will not go there. My first targets will probably be faint SNR and PN candidates.

Thanks Olly! Feels like I just got a RASA 11 for 500 pounds!

Finally! Here is the story. Back in August 2020 I bought a second hand RASA 8 (for about 1000 GBP) although I heard many doubted the RASA, but that was primarily from experience with Hyperstar set ups. Luckily it needed no collimation and I was thrown away by the deep images it produced. It made me somewhat of a RASA pioneer here at SGL and I think I inspired a few, even including @ollypenrice to invest in a RASA. I liked it so much that I invested in a second one to get a dual-RASA8 rig that I have now been running for a while on a Mesu 200 Mk I. Lately I have noticed that more and more people go for a RASA 11, especially since Celestron in version 2 had fixed the mirror flop / focusing problems. Although my dual RASA 8 rig has the same light grasp as a RASA 11, I envied the possibility for easy filter changes that comes with the longer back focus of the RASA 11. Last summer I noticed a Starizona Hyperstar v.4 for Celestron Edge HD 11" for sale second hand in the UK for a very reasonable price (500 GBP). Since I have long had an Edge 11 that I rarely use (after I got a Meade 14" ACF) I now saw the possibility to almost get a RASA 11 and with the same possibilities for a filter slider. So I bought the Hyperstar and as the seller refused to send it outside the UK I had it mailed to a friend in the UK that I would in any case see at a meeting that summer (= no VAT😁). While I am at a dark site in rural Sweden (SQM sometimes 21.6) I have realized that seeing is rarely good enough for using a scope like the 14" Meade with 3.5 m focal length. I had the 14" residing on an EQ8 in an obsy next to my RASA 8 obsy, so it had to give away for the Edge 11 with Hyperstar. This was back in November and it was freezing cold (down to -25°C some nights), so I really could not find the stamina to start using the Hyperstar as I was convinced I would need to spend hours trying to get it collimated. So until now I devoted the clear nights to my RASA 8 rig. The second problem was that I am really no fan of the Synscan hand controller that came with the EQ8 and I started looking into a way of controlling it the same way I do with my Mesu, which is with Cartes du Ciel. That would alleviate much nocturnal confusion for me. I solved the problem by getting a SW USB dongle to connect to the hand controller port on the mount, and installing the Green Swamp Server software (that I read is better than old EQMOD) on a Laptop. So last night I finally could find no excuse for not trying to get the Edge 11 with Hyperstar working. It was clear and mild (+5°C) and a lot of moon so not much valuable imaging time would be wasted. Two hours later I was very happy! After a bit of fiddling with the computer I could easily control the mount with Cartes du Ciel. But even better, my fist image showed much better star shapes than I dreaded even at the corners of the APS-C chip of the QHY 268MM I attached to the setup. OK, they are a bit eggy but nothing that BlurXT2 would not fix. So, for the time being at least I will not touch the collimation screws on the Hyperstar. Since I already had a Baader UFC filter slider I did not by the rather expensive Starizona one (which comes with a dedicated adapter to get the right back focus), so I was a bit unsure if I had managed to get the back focus right (it is supposed to be within a fraction of a mm). But obviously I did not mess that up too much. So here is my fist light from last night. 8 x 10s of Capella (no guiding, no calibration frames). I did not spend much effort focusing so I expect I could get the stars a bit tighter. I see two artifacts from reflections but I assume they will not be present as long as I do not aim at the brightest stars in the sky, and I have no intentions of doing that. The images are just lightly stretched in PS. The first one before BlurXT2 and the second one after BlurXT2 with stars good enough for me. Cheers, Göran

Abell 24 is a beautiful flower-like PN in Canis Minor is 2300 LY away from us, and spans 6 arc-minutes, corresponding to a 4 LY diameter. Here is a HOO image of it that I took 12th Mars with the Planewave CDK 17" that we in the Swedish Amateur Astronomical Society is running at the IC Astronomy Observatory, Oria, Spain, and which can be booked for use by the members. Camera is a ASI6200MM and the filters used were Baader Ha 3.5 nm (14 x 5 min) and Chroma Oiii 3 nm (15 x 5 min). I also collected RGB for the stars but it is not used here since I see that RGB data is forbidden in the rules. Processed in PI and PS, including the XTerminator tools. The image reveals some central Oiii in the nebula, but it is weak compared to the dominant Ha emission so I had to stretch the Oiii signal a bit more than Ha to make it appear. Cheers, Göran

Yes, we all hope this will be the end of your miseries! Göran

Thanks a lot for your understanding and the kind words Steve! Keep the spirit up, it will clear one night!

My obsies are not set up to have the roofs automated and I am not a very technical person (especially when it comes to computers) so I am afraid it would be a lot of stress, so running such an enterprise is really not for me. But I do feel sorry for you in the UK. I heard yesterday that the UN had published the yearly ranking of happiness. Finland is number one and we in Sweden rank 4. UK ends up as number 20. Maybe weather related?

Thanks Olly! Like you I add starless Rasa data so the stars are all Samyang. When I tried this before the starless era it was annoying to see the small Rasa stars inside the bigger Samyang stars.

Planetary nebula WHDS 1 (aka WeDe 1) in Orion. The discovery of WHDS 1 (PK197-06.1) was published in 1983 by Weinberger, Hartl, Dengel and Sabbadin (https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1983ApJ...265..249W). For some reason it is more often referred to as WeDe 1. It is an old evolved planetary nebula and large enough to be a rather good target for my RASA rig, When I was planning my framing in Telescopius I noticed that there were more structures nearby that I could include in the image by pushing the main object out of the center. Those Ha emitting structures are part of Lambda Orionis. Imaged 4th of February with RASA8, NBZ filter and ASI2600MC. 7.7 hours. Processed in PI and PS, including the XT tools. Cheers, Göran

NBC 1788. This cloud complex in Orion is situated just north of the better known Witchhead Nebula, at a declination of -3 degrees, so a bit too close for comfort to my southern horizon, and only possible for me to image this time of the year. NGC 1788 (aka vdB 33) is the bright reflection and emission nebula feature at the top, It is sometimes called the Fox Face Nebula or the Flying Bat Nebula. There are also a bunch of galaxies to be seen in the image. As I imaged this through an IDAS NBZ dual-band filter (Ha + Oiii) I picked up quite a bit of Ha around the main object, more than in most images I have seen of this area. Imaged 6th of February with RASA8, NBZ filter and ASI2600MC. 7.5 hours. Processed in PI and PS, including the XT tools. Cheers, Göran