M20 The Trifid Nebula

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Last night Mackay finally got cold. And man was it cold! 5C out with the scope. So here is my M20 with the 10 inch F4. It's a bit soft as seeing was crud and focus was hard to stabilise. But it's better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, I think. I wanted to get as much outer blue reflection nebula as possible. I think I got a reasonable amount.

GSO 10 inch F4 Newtonian, 584 x 30 seconds unguided on an HEQ5 Pro, Baader Semi-Apo and Astronomik CLS filters (separately not stacked), Baader MPCC MKIII and standard Pentax K-5.

Full field ---> http://astrob.in/194270/0/

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

The colours look very good but I think there is more than seeing hampering your efforts on getting better detail here Kevin?...how do you focus?

Yes, still better than a slap in the face with a wet fish though

Mike

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks Mike. Yeah it's soft. I get it in focus but it doesn't stay there very long. I had to refocus every 3 frames but gave up doing that. I suspect the wide temperature range we've been having is to blame, possibly tube currents from the secondary heater, I'm not sure. Not really a suitable night for big diameter finderscopes.

[Geoff45 (Geoff)]

Nice enough Kevin, given the problems. Is there some focuser tilt? The stars down the left hand side look a bit elongated. I would also push the saturation just a bit for some extra sparkle.
Geoff

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Thanks Geoff. The elongated stars are from a registration misalign as each set is okay by itself. So there were two sets of subs, one for each side of the meridian. The collimation may have shifted a bit between flips. I don't have any of these problems out the window. It's too cold out there now anyway and I'm a sook in the cold.