EAA (sort of) whilst waiting on Perseids

[AKB]

This really is my first effort of the season.  Everything had been taken out of the observatory for the long, hot, summer, but yesterday some things went back in (after vacuuming out the cobwebs and detritus) :

• Quattro 8" F4 with coma corrector.
• Atik 460EX ("Gina-cam") back from Atik after refurbishment, with IDAS P2 filter
• Eagle 2 box attached to the Avalon M-Uno mount as a sort of counterweight

I didn't check the PA, but I know it's not good after the summer's weather judging from the rest of the garden lawn shrinkage.  The back focus from the CC is also not quite right, but, hey, this was a shakedown.  The evening was going to be too good to miss and I was really planning on watching the Perseids... but it never really happened for me.  Perhaps saw three, and one was probably a sporadic.

So here's a few shots of targets I know, so that I could judge how things are going.  I started off with 60sec exposures, but as the evening went on, I switched to 5 mins so that I could spend (waste) more time looking for meteors.  Rather than show individual frames, I've stacked the few I got in each case.  So not really EAA, but, as usual, too embarrassed to post on the actual imaging forum:

• M57 5x1m
• M101 3x5m
• M51 6x5m

All slightly cropped, and lightly processed – just stretched, background removal, bit of noise suppression.  So all the same FOV.  Lots of tweaking of the setup now required...

 

 

 

[MarsG76]

Nice set.. love em....

Such short exposures too.... awesome.

 

[RobertI]

Nice images, M51 shows tremendous detail. I still love black and white, you can get such vibrant images with such short exposures. 

[AKB]

9 hours ago, RobertI said:

Nice images, M51 shows tremendous detail. I still love black and white, you can get such vibrant images with such short exposures. 

Thanks a lot.  Yes, I think that colour is beyond me, and I’m too impatient to wait for Ha exposures, so monochrome it is, for the moment!

Tony