drjolo

This is set of this year spring galaxy hunts I made. All images were shot at my roll-off shed with Meade ACF 10" telescope and QHY163M camera on EQ6 mount. Conditions were different, but usually both transparency and seeing were average-good. I am pretty happy with this setup capabilities under my suburban sky, one thing I miss is more clear nights Abell 1185 cluster with "Guitar" feature. 120x1 minute, gain=100 Messier 82 galaxy. 40x2 minutes, gain=0 NGC4535 galaxy. 45x3 minutes, gain=0 NGC3628 galaxy. 55x2 minutes, gain=0 NGC4762 and 4754 lenticular galaxies. 95x1 minute, gain=100 Hickson 68 group. 140x1 minute, gain=100 Thanks for watching!

Thanks! Hmm, I didn't plan to add Oiii - the Ring itself is bright enough for RGB only. But maybe it is worth to check the outer shell if it shines in Oiii... ?

Thanks! Yes, indeed some galaxies have been captured, and some of them are not identified in PGC catalogue:

It's been already 6 years since I imaged M57 for the first time with 6" newtonian and DSLR - I was a little bit disappointed then This time I was prepared a little bit better and collected some subframes over three short May and June nights. It is about 5 hours of total exposures over Ha and LRGB filters. I wanted to reveal nebula outer halo and it worked, however I found it quite faint. It was barely visible in 50 minutes luminance stack, but Ha narrowband subframes helped. This halo was discovered in 1935 and most probably it contains stellar wind that was emitted before the nebula was born. Thanks for watching!

In HEQ5 there are following bearings: 6x 6006 2RS - these are main RA and Dec shafts bearings 2x 30205 - tapered rolled bearings 4x 689z (or 618/9) - these are small bearings for worm shafts I used EZO bearings for worm and SKF/Timken for others. As for plastic washers - these are used for precise placement of worm at worm wheel. There probably should be some washers already, because if you want to replace them, you need to use new one with the same thickness. I cut out proper dimension washers from teflon foil.

Do you calibrate your flats with biases or dark-flats to remove offset? I actually was not able to find a way to proper calibrate images with Pix. I use Maxim for this - its Set calibration library is fast and excellent tool.