Hi Everybody,
Well I have been tweaking this on and off for quite a while (~ a year !?!), maybe time for some outside feedback. Attached is a 4x downsampled center crop version of my image of NGC 4038/39 aka Arp 244 or The Antennae galaxy taken from the Arkaroola Remote Observatory with a 20" CDK and 18.5 hrs of data.
The original data was contaminated by rainbows and flares. These were caused by off-axis starlight reflecting/dispersing off the corrector lens cell inside walls. Anodized aluminum seems to act as a dispersion grating when struck at very shallow angles as I found out! After major flat-field surgery most of the artifacts were subdued although it limited the amount of stretch I could really apply.
Please follow links for image acquisition details and
half and
full resolution images.
You can compare this image to other Arp objects I have imaged, mostly with a C11 and a few with a C14,
here. I think the larger corrected field of the CDK is evident when compared to the SCT...
Cheers,
EB