ZWO ASI1600MM Pro Cooled 1st Light – Nereid (m 18.7 moon of Neptune) and our Moon

[Dennis]

On Oct 3rd despite some very hazy Brisbane skies, I managed to record the trace of Nereid in the Mewlon 210 at F9.2 using 60 x 60 sec exposures using The Sky X Pro to image and autoguide. I believe that the default settings in The Sky X Pro for the ASI1600MM are Offset=10 and Gain=75.

The next evening, I swapped out the Tak x0.8 Reducer and fitted the Tak x1.6 Extender (efl=3864mm) and grabbed 1000 frames of our Moon in Firecapture, this time at a Gain of 220.

Such a versatile camera.

Cheers

Dennis

[h0ughy (David)]

Must be happy with that result Dennis, the moon looks good

[RobF (Rob)]

Wowser - those are just stunning Dennis.
Love the close in shots. Gotta be happy with that purchase.

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

Dennis,
Well done mate!
I’m impressed with the annotated magnitude image.
Which software did you use to produce this image??

[peter_4059 (Peter)]

Wow - those Moon images are amazing. So clear. Capturing Nereid is also quite a feat I suspect.

Well done.

[Dennis]

Thank you for looking and your comments Dave, Rob, Ken and Peter, I appreciate them.

I was quite familiar with ASI120 and ASI174 cameras for Lunar, Solar and Planetary with their smaller chip sizes, which I found were quite suited to the Mewlon series of Dall-Kirkham designs. I was a little nervous stepping up to the larger chip of the ASI1600 as I do get some off-axis coma when using my Canon DSLR cameras, which have either APS-C or full frame sensors.

The lunar shots are crops from the quite sharp centre region, so the softer outer edges have been cropped out.

For the deep sky Nereid frames, I accepted the default settings of The Sky X Pro (Offset=10, Gain=75) as this was a new camera and I have yet to get my head around the various combinations of Offset and Gain settings.

What I did find surprising was when I plugged my Nereid frames image data into the Starizona Exposure Calculator, the recommended sub-frame exposure for my BG sky measurements was 0.04 mins = 2.4 secs versus my 60 sec subs – gulp!

Cheers

Dennis

[Dennis]

Originally Posted by Merlin66

Dennis,
Well done mate!
I’m impressed with the annotated magnitude image.
Which software did you use to produce this image??

Hi Ken

The annotated image is made up of 2 Layers in PS CC.

The Background Layer is a 1024x1024 crop from my image and the Top Layer is a screen capture from SkyTools 4 Imaging. In ST4, I created my imaging set up (scope, camera, Barlow, etc.) and it daws the FOV around the region, so I turned on all the labels and took a screen shot.

I set the Top Layer (ST4) to “Lighten”) and all the ST4 data then appears on my BG image.

Cheers

Dennis

[Merlin66 (Ken)]

Dennis,
Great idea, great presentation.
Well done!!
(I usually overlay a solved fits image in CdC and blink to determine magnitudes and "new" objects.)