Wow! What a great night last night! I spent the night warming up on a few objects while I was waiting for the Eagle to come up in the west. Tracking still needs a little bit of work, but I found my biggest problem, was not focus, but COLLIMATION!!
I took the secondary mirror out and could visually see that it was waaaaaaay off.
My son came out and loosened and tightened screws, with me in the eyepiece, telling him which one to adjust. With his help, we got the collimation near-on perfect!
I still have to learn how to process a bit and use darks, flats and offsets, but even so, just stacking a few lights and I came up with some results I was pretty happy with.
Anyway, I took 33 images of about 30 seconds each of the Eagle Nebula. I stacked 16 of the best and the result was very satisfying for me.
I'm still making the whole rig work pretty hard at F10, but until I can afford the ED 80 to go on top, and/or a focal reducer to 6.3 on the C11, then I think this will have to do for now.
Here they are at
http://www.aussiepeople.com.au/asign...y/nebulae.aspx
I hope you guys like them!
Baz.
