Back from an exhausting 5 days at astrofest. Had an AWESOME time and got to catch up with many people (who apparently still remember me from 2010 astrofest
) and made some new buds. The first night there was ok until around 12am where it got cloudy, apparently it cleared up after a few hours but I was too tired from the drive up to wait it out. The second day was an absolute CRACKER of a night. The clouds cleared around sunset with crisp and dry night all the way until twilight. First time imaging from 6pm to 6am 12 hour run! Most of the images were taken on this night.
Now on the the not so fun part, I've been having issues with some of the images I've gotten as well as problem with some of the settings on the QHY8, so if anyone has any solutions to these problems that would be great. If you look closely at bright stars (they're also in all other stars but more visible in the brighter ones), theres a black streak going in one direction of the image, (they all go in the same direction). Not quite sure what they are, asked a couple of folks at astrofest but noone seems to know.
Also, I'm getting very blown out stars and cores with the current settings on my QHY8 (0 gain and 125 offset as per the manual). All the frames were 5 min and all sometimes, the stars come out colourless and blown out as white circles. If anyone knows whats the optimal setting for the QHY8 using APT, thatd also help.
I'm not quite sure how to downsize images without horrible compression loss so I'll link the astrobin urls. They are also works in progress as I've just arrived from the event and all tuckered out. Will reprocess when I've recovered.
Andromeda Galaxy
Horsehead nebula
Dumbbell Nebula
Western Veil
Running Chicken
Nebula
Helix Nebula