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Unusual Elephant's Olfactory


ollypenrice

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This won't be to everoyne's taste but I love the ELephant Trunk and wanted to avoid the big sea of pink and colourless stars that I produced as a beginner! The first picture I ever saw of this object was by Frans Kroon with a Canon 20Da and only the brighter rim of the ionization front showed strongly. It was an eerie and beautiful image which still hangs in our lounge and this was the 'look' I wanted.

So, a peach of a run last night, 6.6 hours of OSC in the TEC140 and, over on the Altair Astro 115/iOptron, three hours of Ha. 9.6 hours in an entirely hassle free night with even the Tak mount behaving! (I think we may have nailed the issue at last.)

Olly

E-TRUNK-HAOSC-X2.jpg

...and a crop of the business end of the object. I do like the TEC lens.

E-TRUNK-HAOSCCROP-X3.jpg

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Oh my you even split that double that is north of the trunk, err is that even a triple (?) really nice.

Off-Topic: How did you fix the issue of the mount?

Yves.

Cheers Yves,

It's a triple. (Thanks noticing that bit!) I had to do a separate stretch of the original data just for that star system and layer it on over the over-exposed blob that was there in the first stretch. I could make the triple clearer but then it starts to look too small with regard to all the other stars so I settled for the present resolution.

The mount; it isn't clear what did the trick. You saw it fail to respond to corrections in Dec. so I changed the camera for a Lodestar and it started to respond. However, the old camera still works fine on the other mounts. (????)

But there was still too much play in Dec with the clutches locked so we put a shim under the cap that holds the worm gear. This has reduced the play sufficiently to give good guiding. RA stayed on 0.03 pixel all night which is great but Dec averaged 0.08 which is a typical EQ6 value for me. It really needs to go back again to get the Dec mesh sorted.

Friction drive might be a good idea...:)

Olly

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Thanks Daz. I do feel a bit guilty, though, because it wasn't a very difficult image to do. I switched on the OSC and switched it off again 6.6 Hrs later. The EM200 did a near perfect Meridian flip as well. The Ha went equally smoothly. Ha was processed for very high contrast and applied in blend mode lighten to red. A few stars given TLC and that was that.

Imaging is easy when the gear works and the sky is perfect, which it really was that night.

Olly

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I can see why you have that on the wall and wanted your own version. Lovely star field and unusual take on the outer glow only.

Looks like you have cracked the guiding on the mount, but sounds like a strip down on the eq6 might be in order.

Congrats on a great image as always Olly,

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