Last night was a bit hit and miss. The seeing was absolutely horrible, and light cloud cover sweeped over my house in waves. But determined as ever I lugged my system outside. A few weeks ago I tryed my luck at this target, and I think I have bested that effort so I am happy. Locking the collimation bolts seems to have helped alot, stars at the corners look far better.
Not the pinprick stars that Peter Ward has in his rendition of this but I am happy with the outcome anyway.
that looks very good. nice faint details as seen in this nasa apod http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080326.html
that inner glow reminds of the glowing rose and bell jar in B&TB.
which camera did you use and was it the 8" F4? i'm guessing the slight noise are jpeg artefacts. I have the same scope and the MPCC and QHY8 and would love to get alteast some of the details in your shot.
It was taken with the 8 inch F4, the subs were 5 minutes 2X2 for colour and 10 minutes 1X1 for HA taken with my baader 7nm filter.
I would think your setup would be able to capture this. The uncompressed Tiff is far less noisy but when saving as a jpg I set the quality to around 4 so that I dont have to shrink it as much to upload.
I am using Maxim to control the camera, and PHD to guide. I would probally use Maxim to guide through my USB 2 EQ5 cable, but when I plug my camera into the computer it drops the EQmod connection.
It is a pain and means I have to be very selective with the order I do things because after I take a test shot I can no longer control the mount. I should look into why its doing it because it makes multiple night projects impossible (framing is impossible to get right).
