Iris Nebula

[CCD Imager]

Taken with an Askar 400mm refractor and ASI6200 camera on an AM5 mount, around 10 hours of data. I initially started this at the Kelling Heath star party, but due to adverse weather conditions, I only captured 2 hours of luminance data over the whole week! although being from a dark site, it helped enormously. More luminance and RGB exposures were captured from home over 2-3 nights.

Adrian

[simmo39]

Wow! v nice.

[geeklee]

Excellent image Adrian.  Good looking dust with strong colour, very nice detail in the Iris and the "ghost" on the right looking great too.

[teoria_del_big_bang]

I can only agree with the above comments, a great image.
That too was my target at Kelling and also only managed about 2 hours over 2 nights but so far not had any further data to complete it.

Steve

[CCD Imager]

Thanks guys. Steve, it was surprising how much more S/N there was from my 2 hours at Kelling, much more than for my efforts at home, even though I live under Bortle 4 skies!

Adrian

[Lee_P]

Really striking, I like this a lot.

[The Admiral]

Very nice Adrian. One day I'll get around to this target with the same set-up, but only with an ASI533.

Ian

[CCD Imager]

Thanks Ian, it would be well worth a go with the 533, its a great camera, you would capture the Iris and Witch/Ghost with lots of surrounding nebulosity. I have the older 183 as a second/back up camera and often thought about the 533, just a bit unsure about its square format, how do you get on with it?

Adrian

Edited December 31, 2022 by CCD Imager

[The Admiral]

I haven't really imaged enough with it to truly assess it, not helped by this being my first astro camera.

As to format, I wonder if it's more an issue of the grass is always greener 😉.  I sort of hanker after something larger, like the ASI2600 (I was using an APS DSLR before), but your full frame sensor works well with 400mm fl. To me, it's not so much the format that's an issue, just real estate 🙂. In that respect, it'd be a good match for the Samyang 135. Whatever, it's really a question of fitting the target within the frame to give a nicely balanced image, and that's certainly possible with a square sensor.

Ian

[CCD Imager]

Certainly you wont have any issues rotating the camera to fit an object! Its just that the majority of us are used to landscape format, I'm sure given time, one would get used to a square format. Back in the 90's I had a back illuminated SITe sensor with whopping 24 micron pixels, but its such a long time ago I cant remember what I thought at the time!

Having more real estate does bring its own issues, most noticeably off axis aberrations of your telescope become evident, maybe hidden by smaller sensors, so you need to pick your telescopes wisely. My image above taken with the Askar 400 does show coma in the corners, to me it is bearable and because I have reduced the size of the image, its not really noticeable. I would suggest that an APSc size sensor will work nicely with current commonly used scopes, full frame makes life more complicated!