Whirlpool Galaxy 11/12/07

[cygnusx1]

Taking advatage of the exceptionally good skies this week, I have spent the last few nights attempting to get my mount autoguiding acceptably. Unfortunately i don't seem to be able to eliminate the occassional spikes which are causing slight trailing in my images, so i will be sending my mount back to FLO for a checkup.

Anyway, i did attempt Californian, Crab and Rosetta nebula, but either my exposures were to short or my UHC filter isn;t working as expected.

The only decent result i got was for M51, so here it is.

C9.25 @ f/6.3 guided with Scopos 66mm APO on HEQ5 Pro. 30 mins of subs. Neodym LPR filter.

[MartinB]

You've picked up a lot of faint stuff Kevin like the joining bridge.

[barkis]

That's quite a good image Kevin, if a little noisy. Is this with your Canon 3550D, and how many subs were in the 30 minutes.?

There is lots of detailed stuff in the galaxy, so you are not doing bad .

Ron.

[Grant]

Nice image Kevin! You've captured lots of detail in that!

How long were the individual subs?

[jcm]

My HEQ5 pro has a few guiding glitches at the start of imaging.( often in the first frame/s ).

After that it settles down and will run for 2/3 hours without further problems.

Make sure the gears have a bit of weight to push against.( imaging in the East more weight on the weight shaft than the weight of the scope plus guide scope etc)

John

[cygnusx1]

Guyys thatnks for the positive responses, yeah im fairly happy with it, considering i was concentrating more on playing around with the guiding and getting it right.It is noisy yes. Not enough subs i reckon.

Subs are about 3-5 minutes each, about 7 of them.

I'm slowly learning the more the better, there is a minimum number needed to achieve any detail and then quite a few more in order to make a step up with detail.

It's a right learning curve aint it?

[CELESCOPE]

Getting the Kev , yes its a huge learning curve ,takes a while to master it, we all have different levels for latching on to imaging ,i took agaes to get any good results , but we get there in the end , its a good image , take care on the focus , and of course longer subs, it depends on the camera as well , our CCD Atiks would get that m51 in just two min subs, so it does depend a lot of what you are using ,

Rog