Galaxies with 80mm

[MattJenko]

Seems like it is increasingly more difficult to gather decent data these days! Here is a couple of sessions worth of some Virgo action.

Skywatcher ED80, AzEQ6, Atik 414ex.

30x10 min L, 12 x 5min RGB.

[bomberbaz]

wow, wow and wow, so dam nice

[gorann]

That is really decent data!

[StuartJPP]

Nice one!

[RobertI]

Beautiful image, so much to see.

[laudropb]

Lovely capture full of interest.

[MattJenko]

Cheers all. Not all plain sailing getting the data for this, as it seems that so many galaxies in an image makes a bit of a mess of SGP's autofocus routine, so I managed to take rather a large amount of completely out of focus Blue subs in my first session! Attended oversight on Saturday night saw a better result though. I do like my new AzEQ6...

[Rodd]

11 hours ago, MattJenko said:

Seems like it is increasingly more difficult to gather decent data these days! Here is a couple of sessions worth of some Virgo action.

Skywatcher ED80, AzEQ6, Atik 414ex.

30x10 min L, 12 x 5min RGB.

How did you get this with an 80mm scope?  

[MattJenko]

4 hours ago, Rodd said:

How did you get this with an 80mm scope?  

I am nothing if not a literal person, so will answer this, which encompasses rather a lot of information, but here goes

First up, it all fits in the field of view with the ED80 reducer, so imaging at 510 focal length at a rather stately F6.37:

http://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/?fov[]=3||64||0.85|1|0&messier=86

Once the framing is done (platesolving is modern magic), then the rest is quite mechanical. I live in rural Essex, so darkish skies when not aiming anywhere near Colchester. I have no street lights in my village, although my neighbours do insist on never drawing curtains. The data was taken over 2 nights. A set of 12 L subs and then an attempt to get the RGB. The B failed because of a failed autofocus routine after I had snoozed off. A week or so later I got another chance as the weather cleared late in the evening. I got the 12 Blue subs and then spent the rest of the evening shooting L subs. UK imaging for all non-stellar DSO targets is a multi night affair it seems. I have switched to a finder guider from a dedicated guide scope, as it makes things easier to lug about and is just neater. Tracking has been improved for me due to a purchase of a PoleMaster so my PA is now not a rough and ready guess and my new AzEQ6 is lovely. I still had to recalibrate after a meridian flip though.

I had to create new flats to make sure the new dust bunnies were dealt with and then it was just a case of processing it all in PixInsight. I also discarded about 2 hours worth of L as it was degraded due to dawn breaking before guiding failed.

Cheers

Matt

 

[Rodd]

3 hours ago, MattJenko said:

I am nothing if not a literal person, so will answer this, which encompasses rather a lot of information, but here goes

First up, it all fits in the field of view with the ED80 reducer, so imaging at 510 focal length at a rather stately F6.37:

http://astronomy.tools/calculators/field_of_view/?fov[]=3||64||0.85|1|0&messier=86

Once the framing is done (platesolving is modern magic), then the rest is quite mechanical. I live in rural Essex, so darkish skies when not aiming anywhere near Colchester. I have no street lights in my village, although my neighbours do insist on never drawing curtains. The data was taken over 2 nights. A set of 12 L subs and then an attempt to get the RGB. The B failed because of a failed autofocus routine after I had snoozed off. A week or so later I got another chance as the weather cleared late in the evening. I got the 12 Blue subs and then spent the rest of the evening shooting L subs. UK imaging for all non-stellar DSO targets is a multi night affair it seems. I have switched to a finder guider from a dedicated guide scope, as it makes things easier to lug about and is just neater. Tracking has been improved for me due to a purchase of a PoleMaster so my PA is now not a rough and ready guess and my new AzEQ6 is lovely. I still had to recalibrate after a meridian flip though.

I had to create new flats to make sure the new dust bunnies were dealt with and then it was just a case of processing it all in PixInsight. I also discarded about 2 hours worth of L as it was degraded due to dawn breaking before guiding failed.

Cheers

Matt

 

That's not what I meant.  I meant image scale.  I shot the same target with 101mm and the galaxies are MUCH smaller in the framing.  It looks like you captured this with 2000mm.

[MattJenko]

Just now, Rodd said:

That's not what I meant.  I meant image scale.  I shot the same target with 101mm and the galaxies are MUCH smaller in the framing.  It looks like you captured this with 2000mm.

Ah, apologies. The answer is in the values of the image scale. I imaged at 510 FL with a camera with 6.45 micron pixels, coming in at 2.61 "/pixel. Your 101, assuming you are using the 8300 is at 2.06"/pixel. Your sensor happens to be significantly larger than mine and your image is also at higher resolution. If you cropped your image to frame the same area of sky and the made the resulting crop bigger to the same absolute scale as mine, you would have the same "image scale" as mine with even more resolution than my image.

[MartinB]

Well done Matt, that is a very refined galaxy cluster

[Davey-T]

Lovely galaxies Matt, I like to imagine there are astronomers up there taking images of our local cluster.

Dave