I did these two shots Thursday night and Friday night, Friday being the night with the best seeing we had in a long while in Sydney. Both nights were relatively dewy but transparency was good enough.
These two shots were meant to test two new lenses I got recently. A 35mm and a 28mm. This time I resisted the urge to do a mosaic and instead stayed on one field and went deep.
The first shot is centered on IC4628 and consists of 35x600s so close to 6h. With a SMC Pentax -M 35mm 1 f-stop, QHY8 + 2" Baader Ha 7nm.
Bigger field
here [952KB] and 1:1
here. [2.1MB]
The second shot is centered on M8 and consists of 25x600s so a bit over 4h. With a SMC Pentax -M 28mm 4 f-stop, QHY8 + 2" Baader Ha 7nm.
Bigger field
here [952KB] and 1:1
here. [2.3MB]
Both fields are uncropped. Image scale and field sizes are respectively 33asp and 48x32 degrees for the 28mm lens and
46asp and 39x26 degrees for the 35mm lens.
Very minimal processing was done as I found there is really no point boosting contrast or deconvoluting those widefield shots. Stars are so tiny you lose them straigh away with any sharpening. No noise reduction either. Just DDP in CCD Stack and saved as scaled TIFF.
Overall pretty happy with the two new lenses. They weren't much to look at externaly as they are very old. Late 70s I suspect but the 35mm was surprisingly good even fully opened.
I should get some cool color with these two next time I manage to get out to a dark site. Thanks for looking
PS: I anybody manages to platesolve those in unimap let me know. I haven't had much luck so far and I'd really like to see the constellation outlines, etc...
Added montage of 2 panels
here [1.35MB]