Images from my recent mini Astro camp

[carastro]

This is a camp in East Sussex, mainly for the local astro group, but as numbers have dropped as people move house, I opened it for non members, and I am pleased to say a new SGL member attended and plans to do so next time.

We have been using this campsite for a number of years, it is Bortle 4, but of course you can never rely on the weather and it was REALLY windy for the first two days, so much so it damaged my camping observatory, and some of the other imagers could not image at all when the wind was bad, however this died down later in the week, but overall we only got 1 full clear night and 2 half nights.

Having completely miscalculated the size of one of the images I wanted to do, I went for a much smaller cluster NGC7129 which has been on my list for some time.

Dual Rig, ED80/Atik460EX & ~ED72/ATik460EX on HEQ5
Lum 27 x 600
RGB 40 x 150 binnedx2

Total imaging time 6 hours 10m

Very low but have to take what I can get when I go to Camps for darker skies in galaxy season.

This is the full image:

   

 

and this is a Crop to get in closer to the main feature:

[carastro]

I also managed to complete an image I have been bashing away at over several year as follows:

Taken over several years.  Twice in Spain and twice in East Sussex.

Spain 2017 DSLR and cheap camera lens and Ioptron skytracker. 4 hours
Spain 2019 same set up but with a luminance filter and Mono CCD camera 2 hours 
I wasn't happy with either as the cheap camera lens produced horrible stars.

Having bought a Samyang 135mm lens at the end of 2019, I decided to try to get better luminance from the campsite I visit from time to time in East Sussex, but it is VERY low from the UK.  This time I could take my full rig with me and do longer guided subs.  HEQ5, Atik460EX and Samyang 135mm lens. 

2022 I captured some luminance with better stars of the Antares region, but half of Rho Ophiucci was chopped off.  1 hour 20mins
https://www.astrobin.com/sz1393/B/
last week April 2023 I captured the area around Rho Ophiucci and made a mosaic thus completing the image at last.  1 1/2 hours.  Of course we can always use more data but given my VERY limited opportunities I think this will be the final version.

Total of 8h 50mins

I will proobably post this up separately as well. 

Edited April 26, 2023 by carastro