LBN552 area of Cepheus

[Fegato]

Here's my other effort from Friday - centred on LBN552 in Cepheus, with larger areas of dust to left and right categorised as LBN550 and 555.  The dark area far left is LDN1228. There's a bit of star forming brightness in this dark area and some more towards the centre. This area is sometimes called fighting dragons I think, and there's certainly a lot going on. I'm normally quite good at getting the composition right, but missed a bit with this one, and  the right hand side is cropped a bit to try and balance things.

It was nice to have a few hours imaging with no cloud or rain to worry about, and with my equipment behaving as it should. My camera had been playing up with failed exposures, and I managed to track this down to a faulty power cable - all good now - these cooled cameras need their power for imaging as well as cooling and dew control. I've also been having awful guiding recently, and have both tweaked my RA aggressiveness and loaded a PEC curve from Pempro, which seems to have sorted things out quite nicely (early days, fingers crossed). Having smugly sorted all that out, I didn't spot that the camera dew heater wasn't on - lost quite a lot of the comet subs due to that!

I'm just left with one more painful issue now - I've managed to get my RASA lens group turning when changing the filter in a previous session (for some reason the filters are really hard to get in and out of my filter drawer), so now I can't get my imaging train off. As I don't tear down every time anyway, I'm just ignoring this for now. As far as I can see, the only way to sort it is to take the whole corrector and lens group off and I'm not looking forward to that.

Anyway - acquisition details for this one: RASA 11 v2 on iOptron CEM120, ZWO ASI2400MC Pro, 164 x 30s (82 minutes)

[tomato]

Great image! With regard to your lens group now turning, this happened to me and I was advised not to disturb the corrector plate housing, but instead remove the primary mirror cell and put my hand up the tube to hold the secondary assembly so it could be tightened back up. This was all carried out successfully.

Having said that, I note you have a RASA11 as opposed to my RASA8, so it could be a question of if your arms are long enough to reach up inside the tube.

Edited May 10 by tomato

[Fegato]

17 hours ago, tomato said:

Great image! With regard to your lens group now turning, this happened to me and I was advised not to disturb the corrector plate housing, but instead remove the primary mirror cell and put my hand up the tube to hold the secondary assembly so it could be tightened back up. This was all carried out successfully.

Having said that, I note you have a RASA11 as opposed to my RASA8, so it could be a question of if your arms are long enough to reach up inside the tube.

Thanks!  Yes it's a pretty long tube, I'll have to do some measuring up!

[Anne S]

That's a lovely image. I must add the object to my imaging list.

Anne

[Fegato]

47 minutes ago, Anne S said:

That's a lovely image. I must add the object to my imaging list.

Anne

thanks Anne!