Yet another Orion

[tim.stephens]

Well, it's an easy target and we all know what it should look like, right? Have been battling my RC8 to get it collimated and I think it's finally (FINALLY) close enough. So, Orion is a fairly good test candidate I would think.

Sorry for the poor framing but was a comedy of errors last night and only managed 4x 2min subs. 2 arcsec guiding on my HEQ5Pro. Pushing the weight limit at about 9.8kg for the gear. Might need a bigger mount in the not too distant future...

Focus needs some work too but still slumming it with the stock manual focuser. One day, a CCD and motorised focuser. One day.

Anyway, here are the acquisition details:
GSO RC8
Guided with a QHY5l
Fuji Xpro-1
4x 2 min subs
3 darks
no flats yet
Stacked in DSS

http://astrob.in/232316/0/

[billdan]

Looks pretty good to me Tim, love the purple, better than crappy red. The image appears noise free which is good for what I assume is an un-cooled Fuji.
You got the core pretty good too, better than my first attempt where I blew the core out.

Cheers
Bill

[doppler]

Not too shabby for only 8min at f8?. It is a big target to try and frame at that focal length but you have done well with that as well. The HEQ5pro should handle that weight pretty easy though.
Rick

[tim.stephens]

Thanks for the feedback guys. Yes, the Fuji has quite good noise characteristics and looking at the pre-post stacking, it really has improved the signal-noise ratio, even with only four subs. I might be struggling to justify the purchase of a mono CCD :)

2 mins at iso800 was just enough not to saturate the core. Even then, I had to adjust the hi-end of the histogram to reduce the highlights. Still, not a terribly deep image and missing a lot of nebulosity around the edge. Can't expect too much from only 8 minutes I suppose.

Might try a mosaic of this target at some point. But, there are so many interesting things in the eastern sky to photograph at the moment! Hard to know what to do next...

I was perhaps thinking of the Gum 1/seagull nebula core or perhaps the galaxy cluster around Fornax (NGC 1399/1365)...