[Dennis]

Originally Posted by Lester

Very nice image of a difficult object Dennis.

Thanks Lester!

Originally Posted by gbeal

Darn Den, I am still trying to see this one visually, after all these years.
I am fearful that the secondary is "obstructed" at the moment behind one of my spider vanes. I'll keep trying.
Nice shot though, very nice.
Gary

Hi Gary

Yes – I was over the Moon when I visually split the pair. I was so very lucky to be able to have bursts of 2 or 3 seconds where Sirius B was just hanging there, a pale but very distinct dot just on the edge of the fainter, outer rings of the Airy pattern.

Keep plugging away mate – you will succeed. I found a good trick was to turn off the RA tracking of the mount (I did this in software via SkyTools so I wouldn’t loose alignment and position) to watch Sirius A drift West in the field then I knew where to look for the trailing Pup which followed the big Dog Star.

I also found I had to rotate the DMK to make sure the Pup wasn’t hiding in the diffraction patterns of the 3 vane spider.

Originally Posted by spacezebra

This is a excellent image. I also looked at the Hubble comparison (thankyou for the link). Do you follow the same HUbble process of over exposing the image to bring out the companion?
Cheers Petra d.

Hi Petra

Thanks! Yes – Sirius A is grossly over exposed at 1/15 second. I think I once increased the exposure time to reduce the bloated appearance of Sirius A and I got up to over 1/1000 second and Sirius A was still too bright and bloated to show the Airy disc and in-focus 1st diffraction ring.

Originally Posted by Ric

Excellent work Dennis, a very fine capture.
Cheers

Thanks Ric! I can sleep more easily now that I’ve ticked this one off the visual to-do list.

Cheers

Dennis