Dark Shark Nebula LDN1235

[carastro]

Went to astro camp from Wednesday to Saturday morning, this is the first imaging I have done for a couple of months due to being preoccupied with our golden Wedding Anniversary garden party and tarting up the garden etc in preparation.

I had dreadful problems with capturing this image due to equipment problems, wasted about 8 1/2 hours over the mostly clear skies that we had over two nights. I only discovered one of the problems about 1 1/2 hours before dawn was about to arrive on the 2nd night. Apart from my focusser slipping all the way out on my ED80 (which has happened before but I put that down to forgetting to locking the focusser last time but this time I knew I had definitely locked it), so I had to abandon the dual rig and use only one scope and camera. I could not understand why I was getting elongated stars on anything longer than about 150secs. PA had been done with Polemaster and was spot on. Checked everything over and over again, kept going back to park, checking balance, checking everything was tight, changed the guide cable (Guiding said it was running just fine).

1 1/2 hours before Dawn on the 2nd night I noticed that all the subs were landing slightly shifted from the previous sub and DaveyT who was with me suggested the PA was out, so decided to re-check the PA which was OUT!!! But why!!!! I then discovered the locking nut underneath the spreader was a bit loose, so I came to the conclusion that I hadn't spread the tripod legs 100% and they had later spread, thus putting the PA out.

So re did the polar alignment and finally I was getting round stars. But only managed 7 x 600subs on Luminance before it got too light. The RGB shorter subs from earlier were useable.

Therefore this image has insufficient data, so will have to get some more next opportunity.

Sorry for the saga.

WOZS71 
Atik460EX and x 0.8 FR
HEQ5
Lum 7 x 600secs
red 7 x 150secs binned
Green and Blue 5 x 150secs binned each

Probably doesn't need too close an inspection at this stage. 

 

Edited August 5, 2019 by carastro

[simmo39]

V nice!

[paul mc c]

Cracking image.

[Davey-T]

Coming along nicely Carole, only took a bunch of luminance subs most of which have numerous satellite trails and had the camera at different rotation to last time so another WIP.

Dave

[carastro]

Thanks every-one.  You were very unlucky with those satellites Dave, as you can see I didn;t get any, except perhaps a very faint one. 

Carole 

[ApophisAstros]

 

"Your going to need a bigger boat!!!!"

LOL

Roger

[orionoffelt]

Nice result in the end

Bob

[carastro]

Thanks Bob, need to get a lot more data on this though.

Carole 

[Rodd]

I like the blue stars--they really make the shark pop out.  A very dynamic image--like a shark thrashing in teh water!

Rodd