A while back I managed to pick up a used SBIG STT8300M camera with filter wheel, internal guide camera and a set of Baader LRGBC and narrowband (Ha, OIII ans SII) filters.
I had purchased another CCD (Atik One 6.0) with LRGB filters bat was interested in setting up for narrowband so thought what the hell. Anyway, since then I have been learning to use the Atik with some success and decided I had better give the SBIG a try. As it has a 2.156" thread attachment or a 2" nosepiece, I needed an adapter to attach it to my existing field flattener on my Stellarvue scope which uses a standard M42 (T2 thread) but that would leave me with the way more backfocus than the flattener could handle. So i decided to order a field flattener from Stellarvue and Alex from SV made one up designed to match my camera to the SBIG camera. It arrived yesterday so I had first light last night. As I had only done basic testing on the camera, it took a couple of hours to get everything working, but once it was I was able to get a few frames of narrowband stuff on NGC3722 (Eta Carina nebula) overall I am very impressed. Stars are very round and the images look pretty darn good. Don't have enough to do a "proper" image, but in the meantime, here are some single subs in OIII (8nm), Ha (7nm) and SII (8.5nm). These are single subs, OIII and SII for 5mins, Ha for 2 mins through a Stellarvue SVR102T-IS refractor at 714mm, Orion Atlas AZ-EQ G mount, guiding with Orion SSAG Pro through an Orion ST80. Data acquisition in SGP. Anly processing is a bit of stretching in PS CC2017.
One thing I think I learnt last night is that Off Axis Guiding is not necessarily the best way to go. I was using it on the Atik and it was nice to just use a guidescope! My setup is pretty robust so flexure is not really an issue and the guide results were excellent, well under 0.8"RMS reported in PHDII over the entire session.
I'm just mucking around! I actually like this narrowband mono stuff cos it all looks much like the visual view, all grey. I am nearly at the stage of getting the imaging rig to run by itself so I can go visual.
