Another image using the AT8RC, M27 RGBL

Hello all,
Well, this week I was at MT Pinos for three nights. I wanted to escape the heat at LAAS and so 8,300' sounded good. The weather was pleasant, but some high clouds were less than perfect. Seeing was only fair on each night, with the last being the best I beleive and on that night I got some good data.

The other two nights gave poor results and I did have some guiding issues on one night, so only one image for the three nights. But, I got the bugs worked out I think and will now guide using the internal guide chip on my ST2000xm and CCDSoft instead of PHD and the guide scope and camera. I just have been having a lot of issue of late with PHD and I had to try another approach.

So, here is the image, hope you like it. I think that it came out well with good details and resolution. The AT8RC is really a pleasure, it gives very good color and with the TV .8 reducer it is fairly fast a f/6.4, so exposures are quick and saturated well. The resolution seems better and the field is quite flat. There was no cropping at all on this photo.

This link will give the full resolution photo if you click on the photo, please feel free to comment on it.
http://www.astrophotogallery.org/showphoto.php/photo/3601

Attached Image:

Appears to be a mirror image

Rolando

Floyd,

Beautiful!
Great star colors and you got deep on the nebula.


Jason

Floyd I think that looks really sweet! Martin

Looks great Floyd!
Lovely detail & colors!

Thank you! 8)

Hi Floyd,

Looks like you have a scope that's working for you! Great job!

On the external guiding, you can use your external guider with CCDSoft. I've done that myself with MaximDL. As long as CCDSoft recognizes your guide camera, you can use CCDSoft to use the images from your guide camera. At least if the issue is software-related. If it's hardware-related, that's another topic

What I do with MaximDL is to specify my guide camera (Meade DSI Pro) as the guide camera, but still connect my SBIG imager's guider output port to the mount's guider input port. In Maxim, I then specify "Main relays" instead of the default "Guider relays" as the guider's port settings. I forget what CCDSoft's choices are, but I believe they are very similar.

In your case, since you've been using Phd, I presume you have the guider connected to your mount? If so, you can still use CCDSoft to control the guider and use the "Guider relays" instead of having Phd running in addition to all this.

Granted, self-guiding with the ST-2000 does take care of flexure, and does provide better guide corrections (in my experience, anyway), at the cost of basing your composition on finding a suitable guide star.

HTH,
Eric

That is very nice!

I am curious as to which of the TeleVue reducers you are using. Is it
#NPR-1073 "0.8x Reducer for NP Scopes", #RFL-4087 "0.8x Reducer/Flattener for 102 Scopes", or #TRF-2008 "400-600mm 0.8x R/F"?

Really nice image Floyd. Looks like the AT8RC and the TV reducer work well together.