Man, we've had a bad run of weather in Canberra. So many relatively clear days and absolutely horrible nights. Another new moon phase down the drain
The past week has been a write off, coming week too. I had about 90mins of clear sky last night.
Very keen to test my new scope, i bodged up a series of barely-contacting extensions, nose piece of camera backed way out, and got enough back spacing to focus on the Tak fc100dc. Pic of that shoddiness attached. I wanted to check if the focuser could handle my camera and filter wheel, wanted to see how flat the field is before the flattener arrives, and wanted to see if it was sharp. No bahtinov mask meant I just pressed my 8" one from the newt onto the front of the dew shield ad did my best. The single speed focuser seems ok, and this method yielded a decent result.
Flattener and fitting bahtinov are on their way. This is only about 70mins of RGB data from last night before clouds again rolled in. I'm happy with the image scale at 740mm FL, and am surprised by the flatness of the field. This is a crop of about the middle 60% of the frame, and seems ok to me. There is probably some tilt going on, but small sensors seem to shrug that off pretty well.
All but 12mins of green channel was rejected by the pixingisht stack, so it was kind of an uphill battle to balance colours. I also did a version throwing lum into the mix, but I think I prefer this one.
astrobin
https://www.astrobin.com/full/8o1cwc/0/?nc=all