Ring nebula

[JR]

I got my 8" SCT (2040mm f10) out again last after a long period of retirement. It needed collimation which was fairly painless if endlessly fiddly, pointing at Polaris and re centering after each tiny screw adjustment, using an eyepiece at up to 400x magnification.

A very quick test fighting the dew on the corrector plate test shows an improvement in star shapes, using the Ring nebula and star field as a convenient target, Canon 750d dslr, 9 exposures of 30 seconds iso 1600, no calibrations, and Pixinsight for background equalisation and some basic reduction of a lot of noise.

James

[tcos...@gmail.com]

That's a nice image James - well focussed with good colour in the nebula and the white dwarf star in the middle clearly visible. Where I live the sky turned out better than predicted last night so I also managed to start imaging the Crescent Nebula and Soap Bubble Nebula widefield using the Tak 85, keeping things well away from the big waning gibbous Moon. However, there was a very heavy dew last night and it was very foggy first thing this morning with everything wet! Luckily the telescope and CCD camera seemed to be OK, but the dehumidifier in the observatory is now working overtime drying everything out!
KR
Tim

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[JR]

Thanks Tim. It was mainly to see if my collimation had made any improvement, but as it seemed it had, I thought I might as well take a few quick frames and see what came out. It was also a warm up session. For various reasons I haven't been imaging for a year and I wanted a dry run. I surprised myself and found most of it came back.

I agree with you about the remote scopes. They have their place but somehow something diy which will never be as good is more rewarding than just downloading someone else's data. Very useful to have some good data to process to find a good workflow though. I reckon I'm somewhere about Base Camp 4, out of 10, on the Pixinsight Mount Everest.

I hope your Crescent and Bubble observations went well.

regards

James

Sent from my iPad

> On 25 Sep 2021, at 13:01, tcos...@gmail.com wrote:
> That's a nice image James - well focussed with good colour in the nebula and the white dwarf star in the middle clearly visible. Where I live the sky turned out better than predicted last night so I also managed to start imaging the Crescent Nebula and Soap Bubble Nebula widefield using the Tak 85, keeping things well away from the big waning gibbous Moon. However, there was a very heavy dew last night and it was very foggy first thing this morning with everything wet! Luckily the telescope and CCD camera seemed to be OK, but the dehumidifier in the observatory is now working overtime drying everything out!

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/croydonastro/18b4001d7b205%240d9c80e0%2428d582a0%24%40gmail.com.

[William Bottaci]

Nice image James, and I too like the colour.
The stars are not skewed so that's a good indication of a well-collimated system.
I agree with you; rather have more of my own image than even a better one that's partly not mine, though using robotic telescopes doesn't preclude having a go yourself. The satisfaction of 'all my own' makes up for any lack of data in the 'used other equipment' image.
Of course it all came back; never doubted it.
Thanks for sharing, William

On Sun, 26 Sept 2021 at 15:00, 'JR' via croydonastro <croydo...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Thanks Tim.  It was mainly to see if my collimation had made any improvement, but as it seemed it had, I thought I might as well take a few quick frames and see what came out.  It was also a warm up session.  For various reasons I haven't been imaging for a year and I wanted a dry run.  I surprised myself and found most of it came back.

I agree with you about the remote scopes.  They have their place but somehow something diy which will never be as good is more rewarding than just downloading someone else's data.  Very useful to have some good data to process to find a good workflow though.  I reckon I'm somewhere about Base Camp 4, out of 10, on the Pixinsight Mount Everest.

I hope your Crescent and Bubble observations went well.
regards
James

On Sat, 25 Sept 2021 at 13:01, <tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:
That's a nice image James - well focussed with good colour in the nebula and the white dwarf star in the middle clearly visible.
Where I live the sky turned out better than predicted last night so I also managed to start imaging the Crescent Nebula and Soap Bubble Nebula widefield using the Tak 85, keeping things well away from the big waning gibbous Moon. However, there was a very heavy dew last night and it was very foggy first thing this morning with everything wet! Luckily the telescope and CCD camera seemed to be OK, but the dehumidifier in the observatory is now working overtime drying everything out!
KR
Tim