M8 - ST-8i

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Hi all

Another shot from my foray to Geoff's (asterisk) place at Grabine, on the edge of Lake Wyangala in NSW over the weekend. A very nice dark sky, no dew and no people. Bliss!

Anyway - FS-102 & ST-8i. Single 300 sec frame with auto dark subtracted.

[AlexN]

Looks well guided Chirs! and definitely showing good promise considering 5 mins of data!

The Auto-Dark function comes in handy doesn't it! I like it alot, however when my camera takes an auto-dark, guiding is halted, so the following exposure can sometimes be ruined because the guider is still bringing the star back when the exposure begins..


I look forward to more data!

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Thanks Alex!

Yep - The more I think about another SBIG one day with the autoguider built-in, the more I sometimes think that external guiding has its own advantages too.

I'll be doing M8 justice (hopefully) this weekend again.

[AlexN]

I definitely agree.. Self guiding is a great thing to have, however when imaging through blue filters sometimes its not so crash hot, when narrowband imaging, its practically useless... 2 weeks ago I tried to guide through my 13nm Ha filter, rarely found guide stars, when one was found, guiding was unreliable at best... however for luminance data self-guide + adaptive optics is perhaps the best way to get that crystal clear, all important detail..

Everything has its ups and downs...

I am very happy to see M8 and the surrounding targets coming back into the sky... They were on the way out of the sky when I started deep sky imaging... Now, a year on, I look forward to doing some comparison shots to see how I've progressed!

Alex.

[spearo (Frank)]

nice
you can see nice structures inside M8
well done
contrast a tad too high maybe looking at the stars?
could just be me
looks very nice in M8 though
frank

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Thanks Frank

I guess the stars are very contrasty as a result of the chip being a non-ABG variety - the pixel wells are full.

[spearo (Frank)]

Ah ok that makes sense
cheers
frank

[Bassnut (Fred)]

noooooo, min filter on the whole image????