[Dennis]

Hello,

Here are some results from the recent Qld Astrofest; the good, the bad and the downright ugly! Tak Mewlon 180 F12 with x0.8 Reducer/Flattener giving F9.6 riding on an EM200.

The smaller M16 and NGC6744 images were taken with the ST7E and the remainder, Helix, NGC253, NGC1365 and M16 wide were taken with Gerald’s ST4000XCM binned 2x2 giving an image size 1024x1024 (from 2048x2048).

ST7
M16 – 10 exposures at 300 secs each.
NGC6744 – 6 exposures at 600 secs each.
Dark frames manually subtracted after images acquired.

ST4000XCM 2x2 binned
Helix - 6 exposures at 600 secs each.
NGC253 - 10 exposures at 600 secs each.
NGC3165 - 6 exposures at 600 secs each.
M16 - 15 exposures at 300 secs each.
Dark frames auto subtracted at time of image acquisition.

I’m reasonably happy with the ST7 M16 although the NGC6744 was spoiled by thin, high cloud during the imaging session.

I was surprised at the noise in the ST4000XCM sub frames, which were auto subtracted, whereas I usually take 6 separate Dark Frames and do a Median Combine before subtracting them. Maybe that would have been a better approach?

These imaging sessions were quite helpful in guiding me to the realisation that my future in not in high quality LRGB DSO imaging – it is just too specialised and too time consuming for my style of astronomy, which is more of a generalist rather than a specialist.

Cheers

Dennis