Messier 13, Great Globular Cluster in Hercules | June 4th 2019

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

I was able to get some time on M13 last night, first time attempting it and imaged at a small scale for a wide FOV.

Wide FOV:

Cropped FOV:

ED80 & 0.8x FR (80mm f6) APO + Canon T4i (APS-C)

40 x 180s (2 hours)

21 Flats

21 Bias

Aggressive dithering every sub

Guiding was not great, but better than last time. But, I at least know why now. Before with under-sampling (IMX174 with the 50mm F3.8), it suffered bad. Last night I used an IMX224 sensor with the same guidescope and it worked much better. However, while using it, I realized the scope is out of collimation, pretty bad, so that might be why the thing cannot guide very well. Shrug! At least it kept me good enough to image at 1.85"/pixel, very lax and easy going for such a course scale.

Acquisition was APT and plate solving, again, I cannot stress how comfortable and easy it is to plate solve and it works so well out of APT with AllSkyPlateSolver talking via ASCOM to my mount.

Very best,

[6footgeek]

Excellent work!

Having recently graduated from a star-adventurer with 50mm / 300mm lens to a fully guided HEQ5 with a 72ed, I couldn't agree more about platesolving.

It blows me away every single time - in fact, so far, it has been so accurate on the first attempt that it centres the image after 2 images are taken. I know its selfish, but I would really like to see it do a 12 image sequence to figure out where it was... #firstworldproblems right?!

On the guiding front - your guidescope looks very sharp and in focus. I got better results on my setup by making the guidescope slightly out of focus, and it seems to be more stable - The next thing on my list of tweaks was to do some cable management - like your photo the camera cables were just dangling, ive now looped the cables up to the adjustment bolts where the scope attaches to the mount.  I've included a pic of my autoguiding with the slightly blurrier stars (without cable management), and the new attempt at cable management - ill post a thread on the next clear night detailing the difference (if any ) 

With the cable management, ill be keeping a very close eye on what is happening whilst slewing but I *think* that the loop I have left will be fine. 

Just my 2 cents man!