Two wide fields on a double arm drive.

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Here's a couple of wide fields taken with a FujiFilm XPro1, mounted on a double arm drive. Each 7 or 9 30 second exposures at ~90mm f/2.4 iso800. I turned the drive off for 10 - 15 seconds between shots to dither the frames. It worked well - more frames would have been better.

Bias, dark and flat frames, cooked up in the Pixinsight BatchProcessing script, then into Ivo's Star Tools for a general clean up, before saturating in Pixinsight. Only because I can't seem to get that part in Stars Tools right.

Higher resolution

[Larryp (Laurie)]

Nice images!

[RickS (Rick)]

They look like nice images, Rowland, but I wonder if compressing them down to 200KB isn't doing them any favours? Images with thick star fields seem to suffer especially badly...

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

You're absolutely right Rick. I'm just trying to save bandwidth. I'll rework the resampling and post again.

[Poita (Peter)]

Did you build the drive yourself?

[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Peter. I designed and built it myself with some optimizations. Microprocessor stepper motor control and improved geometry for more accurate tracking. I get a kick out of using it because it is so easy to set up and quite accurate when properly aligned.