Early in the week (Mon and Tue) at Astrofest I shot the Small Magellanic Cloud with my DSLR through a 200mm Pentax k-mount prime lens. Ideally I would have had the QHY9 on the lens, but changing adaptors and refocusing is time consuming and I wanted the QHY9 on the 80mm refractor to try for M31 just after midnight each night. I found it very interesting to see
Rick's wonderful rendition, shot with an STL and FSQ106. This one has none of the Ha areas coming through alas - the unmodded camera has always shown greens and blues in emission nebs (e.g. M42) over the traditional red hues we usually lust for. Noise and some banding were a bit of a problem too, even given the low temperature. I guess I'm spoilt with the CCD now.
Still, I was happy with this FOV - far wider than anything I could ever hope to mosaic with the 8" Newt, and getting FSQ resolution was never in any way expected. Thanks to Peter and others that helped me get the side-by-side configuration balanced and working (haven't ever done that before). The lens sitting in guidescope rings drew a few quizical glances and comments over the week, but although difficult to adjust focus it still seems to have worked, with some perseverance.
This is 19x1.5mins + 40x2mins = 108 mins all shot at ISO1600
(Can't recall why I was shooting such short subs at a high ISO - think guiding may have been misbehaving). Had hoped to get a bunch of my AF shots up this weekend, but Pixinsight is the best way I know to process these things and the debayed DSLR files were each 144mb, which strained the PC a bit
, so another single image
