Friday, February 28, 2014

4.5 hours of Horsehead

Crappy shootout on the whole. The final 2.5 hours were really a mess. Flexure, focus change due to temp change, broken down remote control wire, so no dark frame...

Won't be able to do Horsehead again the coming days anyway, so let's call it that.




1 comment:

John999R said...

Very nice work Paul. Your site caught my attention because of the Borg telescope. I image with an AT106APO and also have on "standby" a Celestron EdgeHD 11". I haven't tried it yet because the tripod on my iOptron CEM60EC isn't strong enough to support it. However, I bought a "new" never used AP900GTO with a G11 tripod, so one day that is where I'll try out the EdgeHD. Anyway, I wanted to try some wide field imaging and the Borg 71FL seems to be a good fit. I also find it interesting the modularity of the Borg product, that is if I don't get too confused in the process!

Considering you live in a light polluted environment as I do, you do a good job mitigating it using a DSLR. I currently use a Canon 60Da and I'm very happy with it. The thought of going narrowband is a long way off because I'm 100% portable, it's hard enough to set up and break down in terms of time it takes, so the more upgrades the more time involved and I can only see me doing that if I had an observatory. I guess you can say that is the number one wish of all amateur imagers. Can you imagine just flipping a switch and you are ready to image? Last night it took me almost 40 minutes just to frame a nebula I imaged the previous night, not counting the usual set up, polar align, balance, bla, bla, bla. I consumed so much time I had only enough time left to take 10 240-300 sec images before the target got too low in the sky. On top of that PHD2 decided to act up by skipping the calibration portion altogether, it went straight to guiding. Surprisingly enough, the stars turned out more decent than I expected though. I guess the precision encoders on the CEM60EC mount helped out.