Hi all,
It has been over six months since I had a chance to set up my telescope for imaging. Moved houses, new job, long rain season. But last night, I finally managed to unpack everything and, surprise surprise, successfully re-connect the 1000 bits... Not totally unexpectedly, after a crystal clear dry day clouds rolled in as soon as I stared imaging.
Never mind, I'm glad to report everything worked nicely and that I will finally be able to try imaging some galaxies, as the skies in here are significantly darker than what we had to deal with in Milton&Paddington in Brisvegas or Rockdale in Sidni.
I only managed three 5-minute Lum subs, but there is already more detail than what I had in a 50-minute stack of the same target from nearly four years ago. The old data was acquired with an ED doublet (also 4"), so stars are not as nice as in the recent image, but nonetheless the difference in magnitudes of sky glow is astounding. I have not even used flats for the new Lum data - something that was essential in the city and often a struggle to remove all artefacts.
I am very excited to finally have received a long awaited promotion from a balcony/inner-city courtyard imager to a country town backyard amateur astrophotographer
I look forward to once again contributing to our dso section on IIS
A link to higher res:
https://www.astrobin.com/full/345301/0/