EAA Ha first light

[AKB]

 

A really super night on August 15th, warm and not damp (at least, early on) so a chance to try out for the first time a Baader Ha 7nm filter in my 9.25" Hyperstar with Ultrastar CCD.

I was keen to try a number of targets, all with 60 seconds subs.  I also managed to take some flat frames in the early evening sky to add to previous bias and a bad pixel map.

As usual, I also wanted to check the screen captures from StarlightLive with some post-processing.

Targets were:

• Elephant's Trunk, 32 min.
• Pelican, 10 min.
• Witches Broom, 10 min.
• Eastern Veil, 10 min.
• Dumbbell, 10 min.

Live screen captures are the first of each pair, processed (and LR flipped) on the right.

 

As with previous experience, this shows just how good StarlightLive is in the first place.  Mostly the processing is a bit of noise suppression and sigma-clip stacking, but hasn't necessarily improved things much.  I think, now, that noise is my biggest problem.  I was disappointed with the low SNR of the images, and wonder whether this is a job for longer subs (in which case it's hardly EAA) or a cooled camera (which complicates things too, with an extra power cable going to the camera across the corrector plate.)

It may also be that the Ha filter is not performing well in the fast F2.3 arrangement.

Thoughts and advice welcome, as ever.

 

[shirva]

Very nice ?