First light RC10C!

[rat156]

Hi All,

Scope arrived Friday, unexpected nice weather tonight.

Setup scope, focuser etc on Friday night, when I had a break in the clouds.

Test shots of Omega Centauri, I like to use a glob as a system test, shows all the horrid things first. A quick starfield test somewhere in Sag showed near perfect collimation and a pretty flat field in CCDInspector. This is taken with the scope as it arrived, straight out of the box.

Usual camera gear.

Closeup of the core as well.

Cheers
Stuart

[ericwbenson]

Hi Stuart,
What was the sub length?

EB

[strongmanmike]

Well, the first test looks not toooo bad I guess?...but I'd want to see a little better than this from a high quality corrected RC in due course.

I'm sure this will eventuate :thumbsup:

Mike

[rat156]

12 x 1 minute each LRGB.

Cheers
Stuart

[rat156]

The weather, though clear is not so good tonight Mike. The seeing is rubbish. I also haven't quite sorted out the balance of the scope. Having said that the field is pretty flat and the stars are measuring at 2.8 - 2.9" FWHM.

I'm also running outside the backfocus distance, which will degrade the image a bit, I'm led to believe.

Cheers
Stuart

[ericwbenson]

Hi Stuart,
There is, as you say, nothing to do about the star sizes, that is the burden of high res imaging. But I would look closely at collimation since there seems to be a bit of astigmatism (worse at the top than the bottom? hard to say without closeups).

Cheers,
EB

[Hagar]

Looks Good Stuart, you should have some fun with this extra focal length.

[Paul Haese]

Nice work Stuart. Who is the manufacturer?

[multiweb]

Great field. Don't stress too much about CCDIS measurements. They will vary greatly depending on what you image. A bright cluster like this will show a depression in the middle of the field when it's not really there. In my experience alway stick to a bright central star and a uniform background . Rigel cent is a good candidate. Not too bright and lot of background stars uniformely distributed. And it's nice and up right now, easy to align too. Shoot 120s subs then measure, tweak, re-shoot the same field another night and see the differences from one session to the other.

[Alchemy]

Given the standard of your usual images , you will have the new gear singing along in no time, look forward to the results.. I didn't see anything wrong with the image here anyway.

[rat156]

An extra 200mm focal length I won't notice too much, the extra 2" of aperture I will. The new scope is f/7.3 vs f/8 of the GSO.



Deep Sky Instruments



Hi Marc, the field curvature etc was generated on a series of 15 1 minute subs on a randomish field, well Pluto's in the middle of the field. See attached Field Curvature Map, shows I need to tweak the collimation a little.



Thanks Clive, flattery wins everytime. The colour seems off in the image, I'm gunna do a Sidonio on it sometime...

Cheers
Stuart