First light with my AT106LE with upgraded moonlite focuser

[emyliano2000]

Last week a friend helped me build and install a pier in my back garden. A few days ago I put the Eq6 and the AT106 on it, tidied up the cables and balanced it as good as I could.

Last night I had the chance to test it and I'm pretty pleased with it for the first test.

I thought I was gonna spend most of the night trying to get a very good polar alignment, get the right distance for the flattenes, focus the main camera and the guidecam on the OAG but under my surprise, I got some bonus photos too.

So here it is, M57

QHY183M, Baader L filter

TSflat2

OAG, QHY5L-IIM

19x120sec with darks. 

Polar aligned with a polemaster in Sharpcap and guided with PHD2

Emil

 

 

 

[Craney]

Very nice  all round.      Pier, scope, image ......and that Polar alignment !!!!!   ...all the zeros.....  good work. 

 

[emyliano2000]

1 minute ago, Craney said:

Very nice  all round.      Pier, scope, image ......and that Polar alignment !!!!!   ...all the zeros.....  good work. 

 

Thank you. I'm not entirely happy with how the stars look. If you zoom on the photo you'll see they are not quite round. They looked worse but after a few checks I noticed that a couple of the hex screws in the varilock were a bit loose so I tighten them up and there was a big improvement but they still look a bit weird. Can it be a reflection in the imaging train?

I put a photo with a nice starfield  in ccd inspector and it doesn't look bad.

[Craney]

Ha !!   when I said  " all round" ,    I meant the set up,  not the star-shapes.  

They look alright from my viewpoint and my prescription ( !!! )  .   But saying that, once I get some level of proficiency at this astro-photography mularkie, I make take a peep at me own pixels with the software you have used.  I hate to think what horrors lie in wait.....