First light with the new Atik (warning not a DSO!)

[robin-m]

Got home on Friday to find my shiny new 428ex waiting for me . Woohoo thinks I with Saturday predicted to be clear the old adage about new kit bringing months of cloud was about to be disproved.

Come Saturday around 6 it was time to setup, the sky was clear and the moon was out and shining despite it still being almost daylight. To get a jump on the evening I slewed to the moon to see if I could achieve focus with the imaging train (The filter wheel hasn't arrived yet due to being OOS so I the only way I could get both my 2" LP and 1.25" lum filter into the train and get enough backfocus was to use the star diagonal). After a few seconds fiddling there was a lovely crisp image of the moon on the display and I saved a snapshot just because I don't image the moon normally.

After it was properly dark it was time for a play. The usual suspects orion etc were close to going behind a neighbours tree and the moon was very close to the rosette so I thought I'd have a bash at m51 (my favourite DSO) to get some lum that I could fill in with RGB when the wheel arrives. Slewed the telescope round and It wasn't in view. Not a problem, It's fairly close to the meridian flip anyway so I'll just test guiding for a while before re-pointing. A 20 minute sub of this random patch of sky showed lovely round stars so I nipped outside (I RDC to the imaging laptop from another in the living room) to make sure I got m51 in the FOV with the guidescope.

Looked up to see a huge bank of cloud rolling in....

Sometimes I hate this hobby!

So, my first image with the 428 is of the big rock in the sky.

[Tim]

Welcome to the 428 club

Funnily enough, I've been using mine on the moon a lot too. The diddly pixels make for some very sharp images.

Cheers

Tim

[robin-m]

Thanks Tim, I'm still hoping I've made the right choice I can't afford multiple imaging cameras. Only time on DSOs will tell. Funnily enough a check with the Bahtinov mask later showed me that the image must have been slightly out of focus but it looked pretty good to me at the time.

[Tim]

That's the thing with the moon though, the seeing dictates each and every shot, you can have two less than a second apart, one will be crisp and snappy, the other will be blurry. Not much you can do about that except get a whole load of images and stack them all up.

The 428ex will give you the potential for some great images. With your Megrez or 80ED you will be able to capture some great nebulae. The 428 is super sensitive

[bwana]

My 1st light with the 428Ex was the Trapezium using a Celestron 8" EdgeHD (at F/10). Convinced me I had purchased the right camera after trying a number of much larger sensor CCD's and DSLR's!

I've since gone back and imaged M42-M43 with the 428Ex using a SkyWatcher 80ED and narrowband filters. Still the right purchase!

I've also tried it out with a Lunt 60 solar scope with quite reasonable results.

bwa