First impressions of ASIair with widefield setup.

[Adreneline]

For those considering buying an ASIair I used my new ASIair+EAF acquisition last night for the first time with my relatively new iOptron CEM25-EC with ASI1600 MM Pro, Canon 200mm lens and ZWO-EFW.

Once I had got my head around the iPad app I have got to say I was sold on the ease with which you can control the mount with Sky Safari, the ease with which you can focus the optics with the EAF and the simplicity of the process for setting up an imaging run. The interface is a joy to use with everything easily accessible at any time on one iPad screen. First impressions are I love it!

Not only is everything controlled from just two apps on the iPad but there is now just one 12 volt cable going to the mount. I still need to play around making sure cabling is as tidy as possible, from an esthetic point of view as much as anything.

Transferring images from the ASIair to the laptop was straightforward although I did run into one problem when I came to process last night's imaging run with previously taken flats. ASIair saves the .fit file with 'H' in the filter keyword of the fit header. SGPro stores 'Ha' in the keyword so PixInsight batch processor decided there were no matching flats to calibrate the lights.

One final interesting fact was there is no opportunity to change/control offset on the ASI1600; gain can be set at any value but offset is set at 50 by the software with a comment in the ZWO website to the effect it is not necessary to change it. Interesting!

This is one of the targets I imaged last night - 20 x 120s of Ha of the Rosette, processed in PI (ABE, HT and LHE only).

I also collected 12 x 120s of OIII but not had chance to look at that - or the 10 x 120s of Sh2-240, although I don't expect to see too much there.

I finally have an imaging rig I can take to a dark site and run from a power tank (if I had one) or the car.

Hope this is of interest to someone.

Adrian