Quote:
Originally Posted by DavidU
He's all over it like a fat kid on a cup cake !
Waiting for an image ! I getting excited........
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Yeah, pretty much David
Seriously it was a great first light. Lot of excitement. Now I have to do things "properly" In order collimate, guide then focus.
Initial first impressions:
- Much easier to setup than I first thought. Weight is not an issue. You just have to be extremely careful with the system attached to the corrector and watch for those dangling cables.
- Focus was also fairly easy to reach with the bathinov mask. Although I did experience a bit of mirror flop on M16 because it was low on the horizon. I suppose focus will not hold on low targets, but that's an SCT issue, not a HS issue. Best shoot right up. Because subs are so short you can shoot 100s at the meridian crossing. No need to chase a target for very long. I mean how many subs do you want to shoot? You have to process them all afterwards...
- Light gathering capacity is mind blowing. Coming from a smallish 5" scope it makes a huge difference to me. 11" aperture at F/1.8 is a killer. Proof is in the pudding. The FOV is also much wider than what I though. I must have got my image scale calculations wrong.
- I didn't dew up the corrector plate and had no heater going on at all last night. I'm not sure why but I think it might be because of the air circulation caused by the camera fan inside the dew shield. I also had the cooling fan running inside the scope while imaging and the focuser hole was unplugged. On another note why are insects always attracted to warm dark places. I had a moth making a trip through the fan last night. Bits and pieces through the corrector. So I had to make two set of flats. "pre moth" and "post moth".
- The really attractive part is the integration time of the subs. We're talking about imaging like shooting bias frames. You litterally have 100s of subs to pick from so a big HD is a must.
- If you have a camera that requires dark frames to overcome readout noise, then taking darks is not an issue anymore, because you have such short subs to start with, so no big deal shooting 100 darks to match exposure times.
- Cables and squareness of the QHY8 did not seem to create diffraction spikes or major problems with star shapes. Although as anticipated I did see the ghost images with the cables on the corrector in the green and blue channels of the bayer matrix. On the C11 the obstruction is minimal though. It might be more pronounced on smaller aperture scopes. Again this was Ha. RGB might prove to be more challenging with reflections and other things.
All in one it was a real buzz to use. Love it. I'd recommend anyone who's got an SCT to seriously think about it. It is so easy to use and collect data.
