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QHY12 first light
Hi everyone,
I recently purchased a QHY12 OSC and these are my very first images I took.
QHY12 Basic specs – 4610x3080 res – 5.1micron pixels (SONY ICX613AQ) – 32,000 well depth – max QE 50% - TEC minus 45C delta
I was going to get the QHY8L but summer in QLD can be up to 30C at midnight, so I needed the better TEC, this way I can do my imaging all year round at minus 15C.
Before this I used a Pentax K100D DSLR and was limited to 40sec exposures due to camera noise, so this is also the first time I ever guided for 5 minutes per sub.
My first image was M20 11x300secs, and the next day M16 15x300secs – used darks, flats and bias, stacked and stretched in DSS and touched up with a freebie software called Photoscape.
Photoscape allows 16bit editing of TIFF images but will only save back as 8bit (much to my displeasure when I first discovered it). So I edit in 16bit but only save the 8bit Jpeg result and keep the DSS TIFF file clean.
Means I restart from scratch every time I edit, so be it.
Reducing a 10Mb Jpeg down to 200K loses a lot of detail. So I have shown here cropped and resized images plus a M16 full frame image to highlight issues I am having with flats over-correcting. Not to mention collimation, coma, guiding, flexure, camera tilt etc. Also you will notice Dew makes an entry in M16, on the camera front glass. I made a dew heater the next day.
Equip – Skywatcher 8in F5 mounted on an EQ6 and Orion mini-guidescope with lodestar attached, using EZcap for capturing and PHD for guiding.
Regards
Bill
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