gorann

Yes, I do not think we should underestimate the quality of glass. If within the range of the wallet I think it is a good advice to also aim at a scope that will not soon be a disappointment, but could be a keeper for a long time. My suggestion would be something like an Esprit 80 or similar.

The moon is up so I went for some fairly bright nebula on Monday night. This is the first time I have imaged Lower's Nebula (Sh2-261), which is named after its discoverers: amateur astronomers Harold Lower and his son Charles, who spotted it in 1939. The wide field of view of the RASA allowed me to also include a conglomerate of Sharpless objects (Sh2-154 to 259) in the upper right corner. Materials & Methods: Dual RASA8 rig with ASI2600MC and IDAS NBZ filter. 142 x 5 min = about 12 hours. PI and PS including StarXT, BlurXT and NoiseXT. Cheers, Göran

Thought so and don´t feel bad - we all use it now😄

Yes, a great image Rodd! I assume you gave it a dose of BlurXT and the other recent magical tools.

As said many other things are important, but I had two triplet Explore Scientific refractors (80 and 127 mm) with the cheaper FPL51 glass (or rather equivalent Hoya) and they did produce blue halos around bright stars, which is not a problem with the Esprits (FPL53) I now have. A clear difference but it costs a bit more.

Got the bl-dy moon here too but hopefully may triple rig (2 x RASA8 + Samyang135) on a Mesu200 will not get too much gradient problems with the help of IDAS NBZ filters.

Thanks James, and yes, I thought it looked nice to keep it in there to slightly balance all the red.

Thanks Francis! Yes, this area could easily be overwhelmed by stars.

I captured this young and compact nebula surrounded by some distinct dark nebulosity in the early hours of Friday. It is surprisingly rarely imaged. On purpose I kept the blue shine from Ruchbah (gamma Cas) on the left edge of the image. I kind of like it and it tells where we are in the sky. Dual-RASA8 rig with ASI2600MC and IDAS NBZ dual-band filter (Ha+Oiii). 68 x 5 min. Processed in PI and PS, including starXT and noise XT. Cheers & CS, Göran

Thanks a lot Peter! I brought some light weight equipment (a Canon 300mm and a Star Adventurer) last time (pre-Covid) I went to Queensland, but this time the weather reports and the hassle stopped me.

I am back at my obsy in Sweden after a month in Australia, and this is my first image from 2023. In Australia, Orion was almost straight up and back here Orion is still high enough during the first half of the night for me to give some of the jewels there a go, like Sh2-263. Sh2-263 is a Ha emission nebula and vdB 38 on top and around Sh2-263 is a blue reflection nebula. Fortunately the NBZ filter is quite good at also picking up blue reflection and not only Oiii. While processing the image I noticed what looks like a small blue planetary nebula near the top edge of the image (at 10 o´clock from Sh2-263). Simbad has it registered as a PN candidate called PN Ga1. 65 x 5 min from my dual-RASA8 rig with ASI2600MC and IDAS NBZ (Ha+Oiii) filter, all on a Mesu 200. Processed in PI and PS including StarXT and NoiseXT of course. Cheers, Göran At the bottom is a wide field image taken with the Samyang 135 piggybacking on my dual-RASA rig while aiming at Sh2-263. I have added about 50 % RASA data to the area around Sh2-263. I particularly like the spiral of Ha emission to the right of Sh2-263. It does not appear to have any designation other than LBN857 at the top.

No idea how to do it but with the number of amateur astrophotographers around I am sure someone will catch it by chance, the thing is will he/she realize that it is just not another satellite...

PS. sorry to disclose my ignorance, but Is that pulsating neutron star what exploded and caused the nebula?

Yes, quite a capture indeed! Something good finally came out of COVID!

I just repeat here what I just said about your Astrobin post: That is just outstanding Olly & Paul, I have seen nothing like these 30 panels revealing how dust is connecting it all together! And if you imagine seeing repetitions in neighboring structures, this one is a prime example. Cheers, Göran

Does anyone know if Askar D1&D2 will work at f/2 (so RASA and Samyang 135)? The narrow bandwidth suggest they may not (or very poorly as most of the signal will be blocked). The Antlia dual band filter also comes with narrow bandwidths and it is therefore made in two versions for slow and fast systems. EDIT: I just saw the CN tread @900SL pointed at above. Askar looks more like 10+ nm, so they may work at f/2 but I will not bother when the specs at best are similar to my Japanese NBZ, but probably with less QC. If I would be tempted by something it would be the Antlia fast dual band.

Yes, a great result indeed George! That Antlia ALP-T is very interesting. It comes in both a fast and slow optics version. It is a pity that it is quite expensive but I guess you pay for the narrow bandwidth compared to NBZ and L-Extreme. The NBZ has the small advantage of also picking up some blue reflection nebulosity. I doubt that the ALP-T would pick up anything but Ha and Oiii. I found this review of it: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358830625_Antlia_ALP-T_Filter_Comparison_Test

Aha. Is NGC 206 a star cluster in M31, or something much closer?

Nice Wim! But maybe add some annotations so we know where to look;-)

It is fun to see that this question comes up regularly on SGL. I agree with @vlaiv that it is easy to get confused and I have to stop and think every time. I probably should put up a note about it in the obsy saying: "ADD 1/3 OF THE FILTER THICKNESS TO THE IMAGE TRAIN" since there usually are enough other things to think about there and then. But as someone said here, never trust what scope or flattener/reducer manufacturers claim should be the correct backspace - check corner stars and be prepared to adjust.

Just wanted to assure you that the Esprit 150 works fine with my full frame cameras using the flattener (at least for me). But I am quite sure you would get quite dark corners with a reducer. So the inexpensive way for you would be to use the ASI2600 you have with a reducer if you want to catch more of the FOV of your scope. the ASI2600 may actually be a better camera as it is 16 bit rather than 14 bit. Here are the FOVs you will get with the ASI2400 and ASI2600 with 0.77x reducer. So a bit bigger with the ASI2400: (made it with this free FOV calculator: http://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/) Cheers, Göran

Very nice, but yes you have (or had now) a radial gradient. Somtimes DBE or GradXT creates them if not set properly. Have a look at this image by @ollypenrice to see what the dust around M45 looks like. https://www.astrobin.com/a7j34x/

Yes, this is an outstanding achievement Lee, and what a great idea to capture all these goodies together! I assume you have a quite dark sky.

Interesting and convincing Steve! It clearly looks like the mono is capturing more detail. But then as @ollypenrice points out you may loose out on colour infomation, so maybe it depends on the target. Using the mono-OSC approach could be superior on bright objects like the jellyfish, but if you hunt for weak Oiii from a SNR, maybe two OSC would be better as you want to separate out as much Oiii as possible. Just speculating. But I am tempted to put my QHY268MM with NBZ on one of my RASAs. In cases where I know that I am looking for weak Oiii maybe I would use a Oiii filter on the mono camera, and add it to the blue channel. Fun with experiments but not so fun to remove the camera from a RASA as you never know what the stars will look like next time

Interesting Steve! A comparison you could make that could be convincing is to compare your mono data with a grayscale version of your osc data, using the same number of subs from the same times at night. I assume you used the dual rig so already have that data from the same night. Will the data from the mono camera show significantly more detail and depth?