Well, been quite some time since my last image post - the weather has seriously not been cooperating over recent months. In that time I've traded in my 102mm F7 triplet refractor for a much faster 150mm Sky-Watcher Quattro F4 Newtonian telescope. Sadly I haven't had much time to setup & test it out. But I have managed a few hours here & there so thought I would post a work-in-progress.
This is the first image processed from my new telescope - I won't call it first light, that was weeks ago with really nothing to show from then.
NGC 2736 is the Pencil Nebula, also known as Herschel's Ray Nebula, being discovered by John Herschel in 1835. He described it as "an extraordinary long narrow ray of excessively feeble light". It is a small part of the Vela Supernova Remnant, located in the constellation Vela.
This is an ongoing project. Currently there is about 10hrs of Ha along with a bit over 4hrs of OIII. The final plan is to try to get to about 16hrs of each while it is still in the sky. If the skies ever clear well enough in the near future I could do it over two or three nights but what I have so far has taken me five attempts under far from ideal conditions when I got some small weather breaks.
Thanks Chris. Getting my head around the scope was easy, it was the focuser that gave me all my problems - out of the box it was terrible, even the fine adjustment wasn't working! Had to strip it right down and tweak things to get it usable. Definitely not good for a telescope aimed more towards a "budget first scope" type of market.
Playing with the post processing while waiting for a clear night to get more data, though the limited OIII data is a bit of a problem. Can anyone explain the red circles I'm getting around some of the stars? I know it's something in my post-processing that is causing it, just not sure how to avoid/overcome it.
