HorseHead Nebula

[Daveskywill (David)]

Hi everyone:

This is David Williams again. Well to make a long story short my astrophotography has improved now thanks due to that I have a Celestron Rasa telescope operating @ F2.22 now and on an ioptron cem60 mount using a Nikon D800 with a full FX 35mm type sensor. So this setup is Great! And now I'm taking a better HorseHead as you can see.

It was about 50, 1 min exposures @ ISO 800. It had a wide field of view originally. So I cropped it down.

Any comments?
Thanks
David

[Daveskywill (David)]

Terry Hancock from Freemont, Michigan helped me with the post processing on CS2

[Daveskywill (David)]

I converted to an 8 bit TIFF to early hence the lossy-image. And the trailing could have been avoided: it actually might have been a stacking error in CS2. Because I used DSS, to stack and then because the 2nd half of my images was past a tube-flip, I had to use CS2 on both halves and sort of flip/rotate to compensate for it...

[glend (Glen)]

Nice David. The stars suffer tails from what seems to be rotation in the corners, as the tails seem to go in different directions, and this makes the object a bit more diffuse. I'd suggest a guide scope will give you much better results (standalone or OAG). But gettng the polar alignment fixed up is a good place to start, as at 50sec the image should be sharp.

[blink138 (Pat)]

wow that shows real promise!
i have always wondered how that particular system works
pat

[willik (Willik)]

Originally Posted by Daveskywill

Terry Hancock from Freemont, Michigan helped me with the post processing on CS2

HI David who is teaching
you this?

[Daveskywill (David)]

Hi everyone:

I Do use a guidescope on piggyback on my Rasa scope. An 80mm AT apo F7 using a 1.6x barlow and a QHY5L-ii-c guider cam.

This makes my guided images better... well it depends on the setting, actually

like in PhD 2.5.0

if aggressiveness is high and it's a nite of bad seeing your image can be ruined
as a lot of you know... and it's important for a good polar alignment.. I'm not sure how close I really am. But my image trails at about 1.2 min with 620mm fl (through the Rasa) ...
I feel I'm only arc minutes away from a perfect alignment. And there is east-west periodic movement of course caused by pe. So now it's time to train out pe in PemPro V2 (which I have a copy) ... it's gonna need a few pec runs. And so I need ascom driver support to make my laptop connect to my ioptron cem60... this is the only if'y thing about my confidence and understanding. Not sure about and all the computer programming stuff that goes into those ascom drivers. Any advice?

Thanks
DaveWilliamStar@live.com

[Daveskywill (David)]

I watch the drift in east-west through the 80mm with 1.6x barlow so about
almost 1000mm fl using the QHY5 and usign StarTarg and there is indeed pe in my mount.

It's a 5 min worm cycle. I believe that's what's ruining my images. Any ideas?

[Daveskywill (David)]

Originally Posted by willik

HI David who is teaching
you this?

Terry Hancock a good, astrophotographical man with an English accent

he's been to Australia before. And helps people with their astrophoto

issues over TeamViewer, a software that allows a main computer to access

another computer over the Internet.

He lives here in the same state as me, up in Michigan. And he owns for a mount

a Paramount, and an RC scope and uses a QHY11 CCD and uses a color filter

wheel. So that he can filter the frequency of light at the source before

reaching his sensor.

I've on the other hand been using one-shot color. And used only dslr's with

this Rowe-Ackermann scope yet. Not tried a real CCD yet. The Celestron

RASA is @ F2.22 so that's Fast! And makes my good, work possible.

David