Looks pretty good Tony. A bit more exposure will be nice when you get the guiding working. It does look a bit soft in the corners and along the margins, but I imagine that is a bit of curvature, the central area looks tight
Plenty of detail there.
Is that a full spectrum image? that is, is each pixel seeing the full spectrum from red to blue?
Whats the go with the internal guider, it wont lock onto a guidestar?
Scott
Paul, Cant find anything that will work and will fit with the LX200R..UNLESS YOU GO TO HUGE DOLLARS.
I honestly dont want to do real widefield anyway.
I think I will be able to make it work at F10 binned at 2x2.
giving me 1.5 arcsecond per pixel
I have tried the lumicon OAG used as a Focal reducer but the vignetting is huge and I think its that bad that it cuts out the internal guider chip.
Scott,
The internal guiding chip is so small and at F10 2500mm does not give my much of the sky to find a star...plus I cant get the ccdsoft program to write the correct histogram so all the guiding chip is doing is picking up hotpixels..I thought I had it sorted but it's not.
Regarding full spectrum...I imagine so....its just the monochrome chip using UV/IR blocking filter which is called Luminance..I hope that's right..someone can correct me.
CCDSoft should be taking the guide images using auto-darkframe subtraction, so you shouldn't have hot pixels in the guide image (within reason). Not sure what's going on there - perhaps there's a checkbox somewhere to turn it on/off that I haven't used for so long I've fogotten? It is normal that CCDSoft would do it's own auto contrast/histogram for the autoguider exposures and you can't change that (that I'm aware of) but I've never had problems with it.
Sounds like you need a brighter guide star anyway (and yes, it's often a challenge to find one - I was using 10 second exposures for guide stars for NGC 1232 the other night - colour filters were extending guide exposures considerably).
I've recently discovered myself that what's referred to Luminance is actually IR cut. I'm surprised and don't understand why. I find a large difference in detail resolved when taking an image through the "L" filter vs just clear (no filter), presumably because the ST7 picks up so much IR ... might be the same for the STL11000.. don't know. I'm yet to experiment to see what difference using L vs clear has on RGB images.
Btw.. nice start
Working at 2x2 sounds like a safe way to go, and quite tollerable considering the megapixels of the CCD. If I bin 2x2 I end up with a tiny image
Nice shot Tony, still using my old focal reducer, LOL.
The F/T auto focuser is a great piece of kit by all accounts, I have just finished speaking to the man himself. As Dennis suggests, try the focus thing in Maxim or CCDSoft.
Darn good first image though.
I actualy ordered the Feathertouch system not long ago but stopped the order to give the Lumicon a go first...whilst just purchasing the Feathertouch Micro for the primary focussing.
But its looking more likely I will go back to my original order.
Great first shot especially at that focal length . I noticed the stars are slightly softer on one side of the image this could be collimation but more likely the camera is not sitting square in the focuser.Clear skies Ken
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A bit more exposure will be nice when you get the guiding working. It does look a bit soft in the corners and along the margins, but I imagine that is a bit of curvature, the central area looks tight 
Can't wait for more.
