New Mount and a Clear Night

[Adreneline]

Hi Everyone.

The weather gods were smiling on me yesterday and after a cloud interrupted start I managed to achieve something with the new mount - a SkyWatcher AZ-EQ6-GT - order placed on Tuesday and @FLO did an amazing job getting to me Wednesday lunchtime, securely delivered by our resident DPD, ever-happy, driver - a man who clearly loves his job.

Spent Wednesday p.m. and all of Thursday refining mounting the RC and trying to organise cables to avoid snagging - I failed on this one, it being fortunate I was standing by the mount when it slewed to NGC 2359 and almost got itself in an awful tangle.

Thursday night and with the Moon making itself known it was a case of Ha only. Rather than go for my short focal length Samyang 135mm or 250mm RedCat I decided to go for it and put the 6" RC on the new mount. The RC was fitted with the AstroEssential reducer and the ASIair reported a focal length of 1104 mm. (I have owned the RC for nearly two years but it has seen very little use as I feel it is too much of a load for my CEM25-EC).

I also decided it was necessary to get guiding working for the first time with the ASIair using my SW EvoGuide and ASI290MM-mini.

Focussing up the RC it was apparent I needed to refine the collimation but that said the focus was better than I expected. Guiding also worked remarkably well with typical guiding of 0.5" rms.

First up was NGC 2244, the heart of the Rosette - this is 8 x 300s:

I was delighted to split the three stars in the centre of the cluster:

Second up I decided to cast caution to the wind and go for Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 with just 6 x 300s. Guiding was not so good with this target not getting above ~23.6 degrees and barely clearing the house roof next door - fortunately a bungalow. The low elevation and heat haze coming of the neighbouring roof gave rise to quite a lot of noise and poor star shapes but at least I got something!

Finally with the skies still clear this is 20 x 300s on the Fish Head Nebula IC 1795.

All in all not a bad night!

As for the mount, other than a communication glitch between the ASIair app and SkySafari it all worked faultlessly and coped with the 6" RC plus EvoGuide with ease.

More time is clearly required to sort the collimation on the RC and refine the guiding but the mount was amazing.

Thanks for looking.

Adrian

Edited February 12, 2022 by Adreneline
Typos

[geeklee]

Good write up Adrian.  New mount, clear skies and a successful set of images?  All seems a bit strange

Edited February 11, 2022 by geeklee

[Sp@ce_d]

Nice.. more targets than I've had from the obsy in last few months!!.. did you get a lottery ticket too!!.. well, a bit of cable management will help  The only thing I don't miss about my RC I "mothballed" 18 months ago is the collimation hassle.. OAG might be something you'll want to think about at this focal length but TBH your stars are better than mine were before I switched over to the 150 frac.  Our local DPD chap, called Stephen, sounds the same.. lovely guy, 5 stars on every delivery, works his socks off but always time for a cheery chat. Been delivering here for years..