Beta Crucis Region

[avandonk]

This is 10X2 min for each of RGB. It was an attempt to get a star field to give me a better idea of correctly adjusting the alignment.

Native resolution image 4MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2012_05/bcrux_N.jpg


Upsized image X1.6 8MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2012_05/bcrux_L.jpg


I upsized all the images by a factor of 1.6 before stacking to improve resolution.

This animated gif shows this quite well 3MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2012_05/resc01.gif

The B&W image is a corrected single green frame.

Bert

[multiweb]

Looks like you're there now. Great field. Looking forward to more. :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

I agree with Marc, the Italian Stallion is off and running.....

MIke

[h0ughy]

lots of stars in there, and the colours are great. looks like there is a little bit of vignetting with the stars on the outside, they seem slightly elongated? that is a real wide, closeup, field of view ;):thumbsup:

[avandonk]

Thanks for the encouragement and comments all. Last night was the first night that cloud did not get in the way.

I suspected I had slight flexure in both the optic's single mount attachment which stuffed up accurate guiding and the optical train due to gravity which distorted stars in the corners depending on the orientation of the mount. This is most probably due to the ten position filter wheel as it is a monster and asymmetric in weight distribution.


I tested this by pointing at Epsilon Hydrae which had the optic almost perfectly vertical and about to go through the meridian.

I took ten 2min green exposures. Here is the stacked result. 12MB

http://d1355990.i49.quadrahosting.com.au/2012_05/flextest.jpg

Each individual exposure was as good as this stack apart from slight noise of course.

The solution will be to attach the PL16803 to two 10mm diameter rails on the dovetail with tight bushes mounted in a plate. This allows the Atlas focuser to still work but stop all flexure in the optical train.

Bert