M81

[Mark_C]

Hi all,

After recently purchasing a Celestron Edge HD 11" and wondering if I had made the right choice trying to even dare perching it on top of my AM5, let alone image with it, I can safely say it has been quite a positive experience and way surpassed my expectations. I have been saving up for the 0.7x reducer but in the meantime thought I'd have a go in its native configuation, more so for a laugh than anything else because I fully expected it to be a failure given how often I've seen mention of not bothering attempting imaging at this FL.

Have to say that I'm quite impressed, it's not the sharpest image there is, nor will it win any awards, but I'm happy with the results given the setup. It's quite tricky imaging at this FL, the seeing has to be faily good otherwise guiding does suffer a little and it makes accurate focusing difficult, also any slight gust of wind will ruin a sub. Last night was particularly good, I was getting guiding RMS of 0.30, which for the AM5 and this OTA is really good.

This is M81 shot at native focal length (2800mm f/10) with an ASI2600MC. Processed in Pixinsight with BlurX, NoiseX with slight colour saturuation enhancements with curve adjustments. No other processing done other than just a little cropping.

The image is slightly oversampled due to the pixel scale.

The sub consists of 39 x 300s exposures, this is over 3 days (due to clouds) under heavily moonlit skies.

With further integration and dark skies I'm certain further detail can be captured.

[Saganite]

I think it is a fine image and I would be proud of that if I practiced  in the dark art....

Edited February 27 by Saganite

[Mark_C]

2 hours ago, Saganite said:

I think it is a fine image and I would be proud of that if I practiced  in the dark art....

Thank you Steve! I honestly wasn't expecting anything remotely close to this so it really is a suprise. Given the nature of the AM5, I probably wouldn't have opted for deep sky imaging with this scope as it was mainly intended for planetary imaging, but knowing that I can get these kinds of images at this FL means that it can only get better with a FR and even more so if I opted for Hyperstar. This really is a versatile scope that has so far impressed me!

[Ags]

I am trawling your back catalog of images after seeing your stunning M51

These results really motivate me to have a go with my C6/HEM15.

 

[Mark_C]

19 hours ago, Ags said:

I am trawling your back catalog of images after seeing your stunning M51

These results really motivate me to have a go with my C6/HEM15.

 

Thank you! 🙂 definitely go out and give it a try, you might be surprised with the results. The C6/HEM15 is a much smaller and nicer setup to get to grips with. The C11 is a heavy beast and I do not have a permanent setup so it's never particularly a nice experience to set up, which is the only downside of having such a setup. I went out with the expectation of failure but happy to be proven wrong. 🙂

[Ags]

I think, based on your experience, that it should be quite doable, especially as I will be using f6.3 reducer for a focal length around 945 mm, roughly a third of yours. But I will need a very calm night.