Sombrero and Trifid

[The_bluester]

I recently acquired a 10"F4 newt which has been through the hands of a couple of IIS members, as a replacement for my trusty old C925 for imaging. After a spot of maintenance work which meant removing the spider assembly, I had to teach myself to collimate a fast newt effectively (And buy the right tools to do it)

Last night was my first opportunity to image with it since I got the collimation sorted, so I headed over to the Sombrero for a test, gathering around 65 X 300 second subs with the ASI2600MC, and using the best 55 after I deleted any subs with eccentric stars, and made another arbitrary round of deletions of those where seeing impacted star HFR. Integrated in APP and fairly light post in Photoshop.

I set a dragscript up in Voyager so that when the Sombrero fell below 45 degrees elevation, it headed over and started on the Trifid for the year to fill in the time. That netted 18 good out of 25 subs as the seeing had deteriorated a bit, all had round stars but the HFR of some was not great.

Astrobin links to high res
Sombrero https://www.astrobin.com/full/f1dnbc/B/
Trifid https://www.astrobin.com/full/bcqc3y/0/

[strongmanmike]

Two very nice images Paul :)...Fast Newts rule :thumbsup:

Mike

[The_bluester]

Thanks Mike, I am certainly sold on the fast newt. And these ones were just so stupidly easy to process, I did the Sombrero over breakfast! I keep looking at it and wondering if I have crunched the blacks but it is not that, just the background is very smooth! If you drill down it has a nice "Blackboard" texture all over.

If it would not get me divorced, I could even see myself tempted to sell my Stellarvue (Gasp) and take a risk on something like the Sharpstar HNT, similar image scale to my Stellarvue but F3 instead of F6! I might have to just console myself with the reducer that is available for the SVX80 now and bring it to F5.

[Andy01]

Nice to see that somewhat familiar newt really hitting it’s stride now!
Looking good, bet you’re exited now you’re imaging at F4! :lol:

[PKay]

Sombrero:

The first thought that came to mind was WOW!

An exceptionally good capture Paul.

Sharp as..

[alpal]

Nice clean, high quality images Paul
and all with the simplicity of a colour camera.


cheers
Allan

[Hans Tucker]

Yep .. have to agree. I got the same Wow impression :thumbsup:

[The_bluester]

Thanks all. I have been a bit surprised by the reaction to these images on here and on Astrobin to be honest, but I am quite happy with both (Though I reckon I can improve the Sombrero and KNOW I can improve the Trifid with more data)

Going by calculators online, I am marginally oversampled using this camera on the newt (And close to the undersampled end using it on my Stellarvue SVX80T) but it works really nicely on the SVX80T and at least when the seeing is good, very well on the newt too. Both these images were really easy to process. My only processing hiccup at the moment is flats on the newt. I shot dawn flats and I think there is a light leak or scattered light affecting them though I was able to crop out the impacted area. I will have to get the flat panel out and shoot some flats in the dark, If that sorts it out then I guess I better build a frame to set up the flat panel next to the scope so I can automate it and shoot flats at night as soon as I have the rotation and focus dialed in.

The newt "Officially" belongs to my son so when my mono ASI2600 arrives the OSC one that I used for these images will probably spend most of it's time on this scope to keep things simple for him. A fast newt and sensitive, low noise camera certainly makes one night images possible and the scope and cam seem to be a really nice pairing. My mono cam is now expected in June, so I guess I sold my ASI294 a couple of months too early, I am down to one rig now!

[Nikolas]

Lovely clean images all round.

[Nikolas]

Lovely clean images all round.

[Robert_T]

Lovely start Paul. All that light and fast. One day I may make the jump, but for now it's struggle enough to get good focus and tracking/guiding... don't think I need ther additional challenge of fast newt collimation ;-)