Ngc2442

[acotiga]

I was lucky enough to get a very good night here in Christchurch so I managed to shoot 27 x 6 min @ ISO 800 subs of NGC2442 galaxy.

My coma still ran loose and now I think I had a touch of collimation error. Also my optics needed a good clean... Anyway, below is the result.

EQ6, Skywather 200p f5 with stock Canon 350D, guided by QHY5 on Skywatcher 80/400.
Processed MaximDl and PS with Noel Carboni.

Any constructive criticism?

[astronobob]

No constructive criticism from my eyes, sorry, tho you mention collimation, But that is a very fine looking peice of sky, and a very deep image Andrei, can count nearly a doz Galaxies in there :thumbsup:

[Lee]

I like it.... certainly more coma at the top of the frame - is it cropped? Might need some collimation, the galaxy looks great - added to my list.... :)

[frenchbluehour]

no constructive criticism able form my eyes!... just a beautiful image I see :)

[multiweb]

Great on axis details. I think your collimation is fine. You just need a coma corrector, MPCC or other.

[acotiga]

Thanks for the feedback guys. I recently brought the scope from my home country and in my hurry to install it I didn't clean it properly. I dismantled it during the weekend and gave it a good mirror cleanup as well as fiddled a bit with the collimation which was a bit off, but can't tell for sure as my chesire moves in the focuser quite a bit and does not produce repetable results.

As I will have a trip to Syd I was thinking of buying an MPCC and a Hotech collimator but then changed my mind and I'll try to collimate on a star with the entire imaging train in position. There's no point in collimating and then installing the flip mirror and camera.

I blame it on collimation as previous pictures taken 3 years ago had coma but they were better than the present one. Attached are two examples. M42 is from a while back and although coma is visible, on the other NGC 3293, the lower right corner is defocused and upper left has "seagull" shaped stars. Another strange thing that I blame on an optical problem is that although I had very good focus, some of the stars have double difraction spikes (ie. the blue one to the right of the galaxy in the original picture).

I ordered a set of Bob's Knobs and I'll see where this takes me together with the MPCC.

[venus]

Amazing capture!