I'm feeling pretty chuffed today. A couple of months ago I got a mono CCD camera which didn't work properly straight out of the box and had to be sent back to Atik to replace the USB port. It came back last Thursday, and I'm delighted. As well as getting variable star observations accurate to within 0.05 mag, and some nice spectra (my main purpose in getting the camera) I have also got some nice data on some deep sky objects.
The first to come together is this 140:30:30:30 min image of NGC 1365, with an Atik 383l+, 10" SCT with f/6.3 reducer, collected over the the weekend. I'm pleased with this as a first effort. It's pretty heavily cropped as I didn't have the camera in the same orientation for all the different channels so only the central part aligned with all colours and luminance. All part of the learning curve :-)
Justin, I'm just using a Star Analyser 100 diffraction grating - essentially a 1.25" filter that creates a spectrum. Very much entry level but it's remarkable what you can see. Head over to the spectroscopy section of the forum and you can get an idea. Nova Del 2013 has been amazing from a spectroscopic point of view. All sorts of elemental emission lines as the gunk thrown off the white dwarf's surface in the nova outburst gets ionised by UV, X-Rays etc and then starts to emit light at specific wavelengths; then you can see the blue shift created by the ejecta coming towards us at 1000 kms ... all sorts of stuff. You can see a lot of this with the SA100,
I've got a Spectra-L200 on order for the serious stuff :-)
Thanks for the supportive comments, all. I have been imaging with my DSLR for nearly a year now, and it certainly helps to have things like guiding down pat (this used 10m subs for luminance binned 1x1; 5 min for RGB binned 2x2). But I'm finding aligning and processing LRGB a bit of a dark art ... Seems to have worked here OK, although I've noticed some rings around the foreground stars in the galaxy itself: a devonvolution artefact. Have to learn how to do a star mask ...
