First Light with 10" RCOS

For a variety of annoying reasons related to equipment failure, illness and work, I have had a 10" RC since last may and just tonight got to get it out for some first light images. This is a 20-minute L image taken under the 3/4 moon tonight; it is comprised of 4 5-minute subexposures with an SBIG ST-10XE. I was having difficulty guiding and I'm not sure why, although the polar alignment is suspect; what was really odd was that the AO-7 made it worse. I couldn't get an image longer than 5 minutes, and even then 7 of my 12 shots had to be tossed. The seeing was also typically terrible, with about 4" as the average. I hope to get a little better at this long focal length stuff and also get some color added here soon.

Jeff Hapeman

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Beautiful first light. These RCs seem to provide really script images.

Ron Wodaski

hi,

Nice first light. Here's too a productive spring, summer and fall imaging seasson.

clear skies,

Larry Citro

Thanks, all. I think I have found what the guiding issue was--there are some resistors on the new USB cameras that are known to cause some guiding issues with the AO-7, so we'll see what happens now that I have shorted the resistors out. It's supposed to be clear again tonight, so hopefully I can add some luminance to this shot and get some color, assuming that I have nailed the guiding issues down.

What amazes me is how tight the stars are; I collimated it using the Takahashi collimating scope and made no other adjustments (since the seeing was so bad anyway). That collimating scope is remarkably accurate.

Jeff