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Old 12-10-2012, 08:26 PM
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billdan (Bill)
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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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Old 12-10-2012, 08:34 PM
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Larryp (Laurie)
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Looking good, Bill!
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Old 12-10-2012, 08:39 PM
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billdan (Bill)
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Good on ya Larry, I'll post more when I get these flats sorted, it limits how far you can stretch with an uneven field.

I've been aiming at the back interior wall of my shed illuminated with fluorescent lights from above. I think the angle of light coming back to the scope is uneven.

Bill
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