Hi all, it has been more than three years since my last post in this forum, which corresponds more or less to the hiatus I took from astro-photography, even if I have meanwhile enjoyed doing some
planetary imaging from my new home in Singapore.
During the last years I got busy updating my observatory in Coonabarabran with a new OTA, much larger than my mighty TEC140, which gave me so many satisfactions in the last decade.
The new telescope is a
Officina Stellare Rifast 500, a fast astrograph 500mm f/3.8 with a large corrected field but also much more complex to tune that my old refractor. I have experienced first hand the difficulties of moving to fast scopes with their demanding tolerances on focusing, planarity and collimation.
Anyhow I am getting close to tame the beast and I am happy eventually to produce the first light image with it
. The subject is a classic of this period, the Silver Coing Galaxy NGC 253, however I appreciate how the faster optics could easily record the faint extended halo of this galaxy and yet deliver some interesting resolution on tiny details.
Silver Coin Galaxy
The camera is still my "old" PL16803 which produces on the Rifast a nice square degree field of view @ 0.98"/pixels, which is a good match with the average seeing conditions I have at my site.
I have to admit that I got pretty rusty in processing after such a long pause and I am back learning a lot of the basics, so it will probably take a while before I will be again comfortable with all PS and Pixinsight passages I used to do
I will update the observatory page on my website on the coming weeks or months (not in hurry here), adding details about the new telescope, meanwhile feel free to ask me if you need any information about it.
I hope you will enjoy the image and I am happy to be back in the game!
Clear skies
Marco