I managed to get some photons on saturday night from Crago observatory on bowen mountain. Took my Dad who was visiting from France up there for the night. He could not believe the sky and the magelanic clouds especially. He had a ball (and loves the aeroguard too). I had the APO with me and so took a couple of shots (unguided 30s-60s exposures - forgot the QHY5
on the C11) so he could see how much more details a CCD can pick up compared to what he could see visually in the 16" dobs in the dome.
I took advantage of the relaxed night to fix up the corrector spacing and I kept some of the shots I did here if anyone is interested on how these little scopes perform. I reckon they do quite well for the price.
All shots are 5x30s or 5x60s unguided. Prime focus with the corrector/flattener at 105mm.
The frames are uncropped but they are reduced from 3000px wide down to 2000px. File size is still a bit big though. No calibration, deconvolution, color balance. Just aligned, data rejection and mean stacked. Have a look anyway. That'll give you a good idea of the field and optics. Focus was done accurately with a bathinov mask and the mount was polar aligned within 3-5" both sides... I know that was a first for me
M78 [3.27MB] -10x60s (car headlights leaving field
)
NGC3372 [4.41MB] 5x60s
Another field around Eta (not sure where) [3.53MB] 1x60s
NGC104 [ 3.89MB] 5x30s
NGC 2070 [3.76MB] 5x60s