Well, two months has gone by and apart from some testing of stray light fixes and some daytime collimation (and learning!), this last few days has given me some clear nights. Seeing has been bad to average until the wee small hours of this morning when, during a couple of (tiny!) collimation tweaks the sky just went still
This is a
single 5 minute exposure in the vicinity of NGC 6681 taken during a high waning gibbous moon and after some collimation tweaking. The seeing was
excellent (for Sydney) and the best I've had so far. The drawback of course is that good seeing shows up even minor collimation issues!
Though collimation, particularly on the right hand side, is not yet acceptable, the
good news is the smallest discernible separations are around 1.5 arcsec. Only calibration (with sub-optimal flats) and stretching was done. There was no decon or sharpening done of any kind.
I'm getting very close now and this is a very heartening result!
No point looking at a smaller version so here's the full res vers
(remember - this is 0.59 arcsec / pixel!):
http://upload.pbase.com/gailmarc/ima...10844/original
Cheers, Marcus