We are thrilled with this. The completely rebuilt set-up is now working smoothly, and we seem to be getting slightly sharper images than before. The seeing has been very good - say 1.8 sec arc - for a long time now, most likely due to the drought, but perhaps tracking is also a little bit better now.
Big one here
The field is 40 min arc wide, North up.
20 inch PlaneWave CDK. FLI PL 16803 camera at -30C. 2" square Astrodon 3nM filters. Otherwise, all observatory control robotics firmware and software designed and built by us. Processing with our own GoodLook.
We were especially pleased to see that there was a great deal of SII, not just the tight arc all along the rim of Gabriela's face, suggesting "deeply dredged star-guts" and therefore recent supernova activity, but also in the huge yellowish arc occupying much of the left hand 25% of the image. That strongly suggests much ancient supernova activity in the region, accounting for all the the braided shock-fronts that look like Gabriela's hair and perhaps steam.
Another area of great interest is the fan of blue lightning bolts coming out toward 6 to 9 o'clock from the bright star under the chin. Is this a WR star, and this is material ejected in a semi-collimated fashion by who knows what - magnetic field, dust ring? The increased clarity in this image makes the lightning bolts much more obvious than we've seen them before.
Oh, a moment's cosmetic weakness: the NB stars have been artificially removed, whitened, and replaced, with the exception of half a dozen of the brightest stars, which were replaced with RGB stars. The exception is the bright one under the chin, which we didn't want to mess with.
Some of the improved tracking came from adding an alarming 4 Kgs or so of brass weights here and there so that the motors always had to fight against the weights instead of getting lost in the backlash and static friction. Joe Cauchi lent much needed moral support while we were doing that, pointing out that 4 Kg out of balance is nothing compared with the 70 Kgs of scope, 50 Kgs of forks, and about 20 Kgs of cameras and filters. It worked.
Cheers,
Mike and Trish