Update: Officina Stellare Pro RC360

[marc4darkskies]

For the first time in ages the clouds parted and the seeing was very good (just shy of excellent) and it was a weekend!! I got some therapy for my collimation OCD :D and officially finished tweaking it in early July. This is the first time I've been able to start an imaging project (work, weather, seeing). Soooooo ... I started and 40 minutes and 2 subs later the clouds came back and stayed :sadeyes::mad2::sad:.

It rained all this week and if I'm lucky maybe I'll get a clear night on Saturday ... but I'm not holding my breath. The only good news out of this frustration was that I was able to confirm good collimation under good seeing conditions. See raw "extremities" image below. Remember, this is at 0.59 arcsec/pixel! Chuffed is the word! :)

Extremities Image (Full Res STL frame FWHM 1.9" - zero processing beyond (poor quality) calibration & mean combine)
http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/157138827/original

CCDInspector Plot (of another even star field):
http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/156769365/original

Cheers, Marcus

[strongmanmike]

Looking very good Marcus :)

Gee, you're coming up to a year now since getting that beasty...you must be quite frustrated...but I am sure the intervening trials and tribulations and getting them ironed out will have be worth it in the end :thumbsup:

Mike

[Paul Haese]

The results look good to me Marcus. I have my RC at 0.8" of collimation too. Though the flattener is an issue.

So when do you think you will start producing images now? I think your collimation is as close to perfect as you can get.

[RickS]

Looks great, Marcus. Hope you get some good weather soon... I hope I do too :lol:

[DaveNZ]

Your making good progress Marcus. Lookin forward to the up coming imagers!

[Shiraz]

The scope really looks the goods Marcus - how often do you get such good seeing?

[marc4darkskies]

Cheers Mike! If I can just catch a break with some good weather & seeing! :help:



Well, this was the start my first post-collimation project - no more tweaking now. If the clouds hadn't come in I'd have gathered the Lum data at least.





Cheers chaps! Me too!!! :)



Over the winter the seeing was quite bad on the majority of nights (I've seen a lot of jet stream activity over me in recent months via SkippySky). I'm expecting that to improve as the weather warms a bit. I've been pretty lucky with many of my images in the past. I get very good seeing nights often enough to be confident that it's not a rare event. Beggars can't be choosers though, so I'll be happy if the seeing is good to average (low 2's FWHM). Anything in the mid to high 2's will be useless for anything other than chrominance data gathering. 3 or more, forget about it!