M8 - My second prime focus DSO!

[iceman]

Hi all

After capturing M42 on Saturday morning, on the Saturday night I headed to Kulnura and after a bit of drift aligning through the 12" (the seeing wasn't good enough to image Jupiter), I put the Saxon ED80 on and imaged M8, the Lagoon.

EQ6, Saxon ED80, Canon 350D.
19x 30s exposures @ ISO1600, ICNR on, mirror lockup on, unguided.

My drift aligning wasn't accurate enough for exposures longer than 30s. I was surprised how dim it was even @ ISO1600. I meant to change it back to ISO800 after focusing but forgot, so they were all taken at ISO1600.

Same processing as the M42 image.
Stacking (adaptive add) in ImagesPlus.
Noise reduction, levels, curves, saturation in Photoshop.

I really wanted to capture a Galaxy image that night but I was coming down with a virus and felt terrible, so headed home. Next time...

The one thing that REALLY annoys me with deep space imaging, is instead of sitting comfortably in the chair at a table, i'm down on my knees trying to look through the viewfinder to frame the object, get focus half right, then take some test shots, look at the LCD to check framing and focus, exposure etc. Man how frustrating.
I really need to get some automation, at least to be able to check composition and focus on the laptop. I've bought ImagesPlus which will hopefully help me do this!

Thanks for looking.

[erick]

right angle finder as an interim step?

[Ingo]

Looks great. How do you do prime focus? :shrug:

I want to image M13...do I just take the focuser off the scope?

[Geoff45]

Mike
One thing you could consider is a flip mirror system.

You can arrange the eyepiece to be parfocal with the camera (You may need to put in an extender from Mogg to do this. Depends on the camera and eyepiece) so you are always close to focus with the camera and just need to tweak it a bit.You can get the Meade version for an astronomical price from Bintel, or a much cheaper Vixen version from OPT
http://www.optcorp.com/product.aspx?pid=6821&kw=vixen%20flip%20mirror&st=2
(But see the thread
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=23960 )
Being able to flip between visual and photographic makes life much easier.
Doing a low res jpeg on ImagesPlus is also good. (Avoid stupid step #1, forgetting to reset the camera res. BTDT)
Geoff

[h0ughy]

Onya Mike!

[dugnsuz]

Very nice Mike,
and thanks for the heads up re the other features available on Images Plus.
i just use it for stacking and processing - I'll check them out now too
Cheers
Doug

[[1ponders]]

If you get a flip mirror make sure you get a good quality 2" one. With some of the cheaper ones the two views don't align :mad2:

[Ric]

Another lovely image Mike.

Well done.

[Dr Nick]

Great resolution! ;)

[Astroman]

You say you did drift aligning then you said it wasn't good enough for over 30s exposures? You should be able to pull of at least 60s or slightly longer if your reasonably aligned without trailing, especially with the small focal length you are using.. Although the reduced sized image looks really good for the short exposures used. Love to see this with longer exposures..

[iceman]

I was definitely thinking of one of those while I was crouching down on my knees, cramping my neck trying to get a good look through the view finder.


Thanks Geoff, I'll check them out. Interesting!


When I say I did drift aligning, it's probably not the same lengths that other people go to. I had Jupiter in the FOV of the DMK and it was drifting out very quickly (at this stage I was still planning on imaging Jupiter). I just moved the mount to the south (shoving the legs) until Jupiter stayed in the FOV for more than 10 seconds.
I figured that if it was "close enough" at 9m focal length, that it would be good enough at 600mm focal length.. but I was wrong. I tried 60s exposures and there was evident trailing when I zoomed in.
So my drift aligning was very quick and dirty. Next time I definitely plan to do it more carefully and aim to take longer exposures.

Thanks again for your comments.

[davidpretorius]

what, another one........... i only thought there was going to be one dso and he would come back to us.

we could forgive one slip up mate, but 2 lovely dso's......

mars isn't that low...........bugga the seeing