47 Tuc at Astrofest

[firstlight]

Hi all,

I played with my new toy, Celestron C90, and managed to overcome irregular light cone making weird shaped stars, focusing issues, unbalanced mount, and unmodded camera to come up with this image as the highlight of the Astrofest for me.
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Here is a single frame from that night.

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I have to find that image stacking program people were talking about at the camp... I thought it was Auto Stacker.

Tony

[h0ughy]

nice one Tony - can understand the focusing issues!!

[h0ughy]

deep sky stacker or Images Plus, DSS is free, IP is not

[firstlight]

Thanks David, downloaded it tonight and stunned by the results, check LMC thread:thumbsup:

[Ingo]

Looks like your tracking was a bit off as the stars are elongated. If you get one sharp rounded star picture, stay with that exposure length and just do more pictures for stacking. Deep Sky Stacker tracks very well if you don't have any usable mount to track and are just using a tripod, or you have a mount that you can't do very long exposures with.

Nice capture nonetheless! :thumbsup:

[firstlight]

I am very impressed as the c-90 has a light path problem, the mount was unbalanced because I was not set up to use such a heavy lens and it was not central on the RA shaft so the weight was dragging the mount. As I said I was just playing around to see the potential, and it looks bright (pardon the pun:D). I only took 3 images, first one trailed to buggery, the other 2 it was locked up as good as I could get it.

Now in the market for a eq5 equivalent with polar scope and dual drives.

[firstlight]

Here is the result from DSS.
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[firstlight]

Results processing the tifs rather than the jpgs. Slightly sharper.
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[Ric]

Hi Tony, they are great images of the queen of the globulars. The second imagesusing the DSS program have brought them up nicely, very detailed and sharp.

A fine job