Hi all,
While waiting for clear skies, I started pondering, if it would be of any benefit to one day in a distant future get a bigger telescope.
My current setup allows for imaging at 1.61 app at f/4.5 and at 1.21 app at f/6. Taking seeing out of the equation, the most important aspect affecting actual level of detail in the data is guiding. From what I have seen so far, my mount has been guiding with RMS errors between 0.2-0.4 arcseconds. So during worse nights, and assuming standard distribution, about 68% of guiding will be within +-0.4 arcseconds, and the mount will be able to keep guiding to within +-0.8 arcseconds at all times (100% of samples). This suggests 1.6 arcseconds variation in total, about 1 pixel at f/4.5 and about 1.3 pixels at f/6. Worse guiding is most likely a result of worse seeing, so this would probably be masked by the seeing anyway.
However, for the better nights and with the mount performing the best it has so far, with RMS 0.2 arcseconds, meaning it kept on target to within +-0.2 arcseconds at 68% of the time, and at all times (100% of the samples) +-0.4 arcseconds = 0.8 arcseconds total variation, which is about half a pixel at f/4.5 and 0.7 pixels at f/6.
From those rough estimates, given I did not somewhere commit a mathematical crime, it looks like for exceptional nights it might be okay to put a
slightly larger telescope in order to capture that extra level of detail with my current camera. Another option to justify buying a larger telescope could be upgrading the camera to one with larger pixels
Okay, enough of that, where are those clear skies?