M64: Black eye galaxy

Spring time sky is full of galaxies but unfortunately they are all really small...

I finally changed my 8 inch Celestron to the mount. I've tried it few times earlier but I've never took proper images through it. Biggest problem is that I bought Meade's f/6.3 focal reducer which has really short distance to the chip, only some 55mm. And I have OAG and filter wheel in front of the camera... And because the distance isn't right, there's quite bad coma near edges and OAG's mirror and that causes really odd shaped stars to the guider.

But when I finally get everything working I was quite satisfied with the result. Even though seeing was awful, FWHD was over 4 all the time.

Here is sleeping beauty galaxy or M64 of constellation Coma Berenices. Exposure is 2h 15min of Luminance and 4*5min of RGB (bin 3*3).

IC 5146: Cocoon nebula re-processed

M51: Whirlpool galaxy re-processed

I had good time trying to re-process my old images when I sat in a hotel room in my business trip.

Here's M51 imaged with Atik314e.

M38, NGC1907, IC417, NGC1931, Sh2-237 and parts of Sh2-230

There's a lot of stuff in this part of constellation Auriga. A lot of dim nebulosity of those Sharpless -objects and many open clusters.

I took the color data when I had problems with that camera driver, so RGB channels are not calibrated. Processing this object was really hard for my skills, because I wanted to maintain the colors of the stars. But I'm quite happy for the final result!

The image is Ha(HaR)GB with exposure of 6*20min (Ha) and 3*10min (RGB).

M45; The Pleiades

I've planned to image this nice object since I started few years ago, and now I finally aimed my telescope towards it.

Camera's new driver is working perfectly so imaging is now more than easy!! Just have to make a script in CCDCommander and let it do all the work. But there's still some final adjustments left to do with it...

Exposure: 6*10 minutes of luminance and 6*5 minutes of RGB (bin2*2)

M81 and M82 with colors

Few days ago I tested and adjusted new software of the main camera. I got the binning modes running again so I also calibrated Focusmax and made some test drives of whole system. Everything run smoothly so I took more images of these galaxies.

Of course the clouds came in again and stopped my session to only 3 images of blue channel so it is weaker than the others. There's also a lot of noise left in L-channel.

 I'm not satisfied with this now but maybe I'll give this some more light later...

5*10 min of luminance, 6*5 min (bin 2*2) of red and green and 3*5 min (bin 2*2) of Blue.

M81 and M82

There has been some cold related problems in my main camera's driver so I haven't been able to take proper pictures. And temperature has been less than -20C on every clear night for a last week.

Yesterday before the clouds came I took few images of M81 region with luminance filter.

There's only three 10 minutes exposures in the picture.