Deer Lick Group & Stephan's Quintet

[JohnSadlerAstro]

Hi,

Warning--horrible data alert!!!  

I've been having big guiding issues for the last 6 months, so last night I decided it was time to hit them head-on and try to sort as much out as I could in one go. The first issue, the RA motor losing speed, I've already solved--it's caused by the EQ5's screw clutch on the RA worm working loose. The other main issues seem to be resolved by calibrating once I'm pointing at the area I want to guide in. Most of the time, the guiding was well within 2", most of the time it averaged about 1.5" total RMS error.

The sky cleared rather late, so I wasn't able to start up testing and imaging until almost midnight, then I had to get the galaxies centred and so on. It took a lot longer than it should for 2 main reasons, 1. I forgot to check the focus on a bright star before going galaxy hunting, and 2. I kept leaving the mount handset in the 16x setting for centring then starting up the guiding and throwing it back off again. ? 

Anyway it seemed to settle down by about 1:45, and I got 8 3min subs for all the effort. Overall I'm quite pleased, I solved lots of issues and worked through them until everything was working finally. Coma is an issue, I will try re doing collimation and also use stretched flats to get the secondary light cone dead on the sensor.

I'm pretty sure the air was a bit misty as a plane went over at one point with landing lights on, making a broad searchlight beam reaching over about a third of the sky. 

EOS 1000d, Modded on EQ5 with 130PDS. 8 x 200 sec at ISO 800. Stacked in DSS, Processed in StarTools.

 

I did a run through on astrometry.net with a rough process, I seem to have got quite a few of the galaxies.

I'm wanting to work on this image a lot more, If I can get the coma sorted I'll just start over again with the data, it's an easy object to find so I'm not too worried about that. My main worry is that even with a couple of hours data I wont see any more than this. I'd like to get a bit more of an M81 style view of NGC 7331, with Stephan's Quintet at the side. There's very little colour detail in 7331, I don't know if this will improve with more data, or am I wanting too much out of my setup? ?

John

[Rodd]

I think condition are the bugaboo in this case.  Stars look good, so guiding is acceptable, and focus looks spot on.  I think if you get some dark, clear nights and collect allot more data you will see a big improvement.  Its a great start though.  

Rodd