First shots with new scope- Trunk & Soul

[pipnina]

Having bought a 130mm f6.6 triplet from @Daniel Karl recently, and finally having the chance to take a few shots I feel worthy of sharing (albeit limited by technical or cloud issues)

I visited the soul nebula in HOO first. At this time I was simply trying to get to grips with the scope so I was running it without flattener and it shows at the corners. Even so, this was only 25 minutes of exposure each for OIII and Ha as this image led me to discover the focuser slipping problem- switching between OIII and Ha filter offsets through the night made the focuser slip ever so slightly, and by only a few subs in the images became unusable. Still, the result from what I could keep was nice enough!

 

More recently I put the corrector in and narrowed the backspacing down a bit. I still need to add some more space, but for now I have run out of shims so the current spacing will have to do, and is better than without corrector at present anyway!

Sadly no bi colour for this one as it was also a rush job. This time due to clouds- even some of the final picture has clouds in it and that was after rejecting 60% of the subs!

I'm quite impressed by the sharpness this scope is giving me though. In the center the stars that aren't saturated are sharper than those produced by my f4 newtonian! The saturated ones are another matter but, we can't expect the best of both worlds!

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I tried to make up for the lack of OIII by using image processing magicks in RawTherapee. Not sure which one I prefer.

Hopefully once I have a replacement focuser (If possible, research still ongoing!) I will be able to get the full potential out of this scope, as so far it has shown a lot of promise even with the headaches I've endured this last week or so!

Clear skies

[pipnina]

Oh yeah, I forgot to add in the california nebula shot I got as well: