Deep sky, strong wind!!

[Paul M]

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET.....

I finally got some time with my new ASI178MC camera last night. The sky was exceptionally transparent but still with urban light pollution. I set up at work and set new targets at break times (12 hour night shift) and I would have been better taking the 127 Mak as the 250 PDS is like a sail in the wind, particularly at the imaging scale of this camera. It's actually neither a planetary nor a deep sky camera but somewhere between, which is why I bought it.

All captured via APT, guided with PHD2 and an ASI120MM guide camera with a Skywatcher 50mm finder ( a match made in heaven!).

So, the wind took its toll. Every single sub struggled with vibration. Because I knew these were never going to be wall mounted works of art I never did any calibration frames; dust bunnies, amp glow, vignetting...All laid bare!

Having said all that I love them all. Particularly my first ever Horse Head. These are the same data but handled differently in DSS. The first one is a normal kind of debayering, the second used a "superpixel" routine that effectively bins the data 2x2 but with higher quality colour rendition. Of course they took slightly different routes through Photoshop too. It's amazing DSS made such a good job of recovering the wind smeared stars.

 

 

My first ever Crab Nebula. Mingin' stars as already explained. This was stacked in ASTAP which throws out images that are already processed to some degree. I like how it handles colour and stretching. As with the Horses above this is the full size image, no crop and look at the colours showing in the nebula! I think this camera was made for the Crab Can't wait to get some decent data on this. With calibration frames and tight stars even this 4 x 180 sec would have been a worthwhile image.

 

A few days ago I saw it mentioned on SGL; Mayall ii, a Globular Belonging to M 31, so very, very distant. I decided to see if I could catch it. Ok, the same issues as all the above but most important is the obvious fact that this target is going to need rather more focal length than my native f5 Newt

I think with tighter stars the Glob would have perhaps stood out as non-stellar.

My main imaging run last night was 20 x 180 subs of Stephan's Quintet. They looked ok on the APT screen on my little notebook but they just wouldn't stack. The stars were clearly not up to the task. It's going to take much more effort...