Omega Centauri

[middy]

After waiting weeks to test out my new mount the clouds finally disappeared enough for me to have a test run last night.

This was my first time at imaging with an EQ mount. Previously I was limited to planetary imaging with a Dob mount. Now a whole new world of galaxies has opened up. :D

As this was my first time at trying to drift align I spent ages trying to get it right. I think I was improving the alignment slowly. In the end I decided that would have to do because I was busting to try and image something .... and what better something than Omega Centauri.

Anyway, I only managed to get 10 decent 30 second images before the cloud started appearing again. After processing in Iris this was the result.

The second image was a combined image produced by Envisage as the imaging run proceeded. Does anyone know why the stars did a sudden 90 deg. turn and started drifting in a different direction? I was thinking maybe something was loose and started to slip? :shrug:

[multiweb]

Nice shot. Very well resolved.:thumbsup: I'm not familiar with envisage but that looks like a registration problem during stacking or id it's in the individual subs then it's guiding gone bad.

[middy]

Thanks Marc. This is one of the last frames in the run. Whatever was causing the drift it was getting worse with each successive frame. There was no guiding involved.

[floyd_2]

If you weren't guiding, and were using Envisage to stack your images in real time for you, it looks like you didn't use Drizzle as your image processing option.

If you select Drizzle, the program allows you to select two stars in the field as well. The first is the shift star - that's the position that will be shifted for subsequent images. The second star is used to determine the rotation angle from the first star (and to then correct for image rotation).

Keep your two selected stars in the middle third of the image to allow for maximum star shift during your imaging session.

Dean