30 Jan 2012

First proper testing of equipment

FINALLY!! After almost two months of clouds and rain there was a clear night!

It took about an hour to align the mount, calibrate the autoguider and make some V-curves for the FocusMax but then was time to start imaging. Everything started to work without a single problem and I was quite relieved. Mount was guiding smoothly (error below 0.3 pixels with internal guider's chip and unbinned).

I aimed the system towards NGC7023 in Cepheus. Took some Luminance and then RGB-channels. But, as usual, the fog came and stopped me after about 4 hours.

Here's LRGB image with about 4hrs of exposure (105:50:50:50 min). L unbinned and RGB binned 2*2.

Here's about the full frame.


Here's cropped version

I'll need to take much more Luminance to dig out those darker parts. So there's more to come...

My APM's original focuser was crying trying to carry all the weight of the STL. And it really can't handle it so I've already waiting for Feather Touch's focuser.

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