With my camera finally repaired I headed down to dark skies at Glen Aplin last weekend with the AP140 (Greg Bradley's "old" scope) for its first outing. My target for the weekend was the SMC which is presented here in LRGB. I also collected some Ha and Oiii and will be producing a RGB/NB blend some time soonish.
We had clear skies but there was a lot of moisture in the air and the seeing was pretty awful a lot of the time. Despite this the scope performed brilliantly and I'm very happy with the result. Perhaps a slight amount of tilt to be tweaked out...
Scope: AP140EDF = 771mm FL, Atlas focuser
Mount: AP900
Camera: U16M
Filters: Astrodon E series Gen 2 LRGB
Guiding: Lodestar / Borg 50mm guide scope
Image scale: 2.41 arcsec/pixel (drizzled to about 1.8 arcsec/pixel)
Exposures: 21x600s L, 6x900s R, 6x900s G, 6x900s G
Processing: PixInsight 1.8
The IIS image compression really kills this image so please take a look at the Astrobin version, preferably at high res!
http://www.astrobin.com/full/211572/0/
Constructive comments are always appreciated
Cheers,
Rick.