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Dusty Eta
This was more in the nature of an experiment to see how my gear (with OAG) works with my 8" Newt. Its all a bit heavy for the HEQ5 but the guiding seemed really stable and PA seemed good (drift aligned with PHD). Sadly all the stars came out quite misshapen and these distortions were as evident in my accidental 6 second Ha subs as they were in the 18x 120 second Ha subs. Thus I'm assuming these distortions were in the imaging train (camera tilt, collimation, incorrect distance from chip to coma corrector). The distortions seemed to be radial (see screen shots from each corner) and off centre (one corner is better than the rest), making me think it was a combination of uncorrected coma and either camera tilt or collimation? Would love opinions from more experienced heads. I tried to process out some of the dodgy stars but have included both images, the last of which is the more final image.
In processing I was enjoying the contrast with the dark central dusty sections rather than worrying about the region around Eta Carinae itself.
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