[Shiraz (Ray)]

Hi
Finally got the SX H694 camera back after repair of a faulty Peltier. Had a few hours without cloud, and got some images to test it out - the moon was fairly bright, but M20 was far enough away for colour. Then spent many hours trying to work out how to get Pixinsight to do what I wanted with the results…...still got a way to go on that front.

Had some optics faults in these images – have since fixed the image plane tilt and tidied up the diffraction sources (I hope), but there is some astigmatism that has crept in from somewhere that I still have to sort out. Of course the EQ6 has relatively high tracking noise and the stars are a bit ropey at the scale of not much more than 1 arcsec/pixel.

Overall though, am pleased with the first colour test – the camera is sensitive and quiet, the system resolution is good and scale is suitable - am doing the work-up with a 200f4 scope and it looks like the design spec of 250-300f4 for the final scope will be about right.

The M20 image is cropped and scaled by a factor of 0.5 to fit the posting limit. A cropped section of the nebula is shown at native scale in the second image and I was stoked to see the jet that is just visible as a tiny horizontal thread extending to the left of the central cloud feature.

M20 - LRGB - 22:13:9:13 minutes - 30sec L subs, 40sec RGB subs

Thanks for looking. Regards ray