First Light Equinox 80ED - M13 and M51

[old_eyes]

Last Friday I managed to get out with my new Equinox 80ED around midnight to start trying to put into practice some of the things I learned with Olly at Les Granges in June.

So Equinox 80ED on unguided CG5-GT with one shot colour Atik 16ic. Mount unguided so I was limited to 1min subs

First up M13. 14 x 1 min subs with darks and bias - no flats. Assembled in AstroArt and tweaked in Photoshop Elements.

I am quite pleased with the number of stars I managed to pull out. One advantage of Elements over full Photoshop is it makes you go slow with the curves. Not sure about the colour though. Many of the other images on SGL show rather more yellow to the stars. These seem a bit blue. I wondered if there was a problem with the de-bayering step, but I have checked it on some terrestrial objects and it is OK. Any ideas?

Next M51 (a target I really want to get) 30 x 1 min subs, rest as for M13. If I push it further I seem to burn out the cores. But again not bad I think for first trial with this rig on a night that never really got dark, and only the third try with the Atik.

I guess I at learned at least a few things Olly!

All advice gratefully received

old_eyes