Posts Made By: Eric Houby

Michael, all three are fantastic but I have to say the M31 is my favorite!

-Eric

Great job Jim.

Floyd,

Guide scope flexure was not an issue for me while imaging with a G11 at a scale of 2.5 arc-sec/px but results were poor while imaging at 1 arc-sec/px. Most of my exposures had stars that were elongated at an angle to the RA axis. After upgrading the front cover of my QSI 516ws to the integrated OAG version my guiding improved to the point where I can consistently get good results with 15 minute exposures at 1 arc-sec/px. Before getting the OAG I had spent a lot of time chasing "mount" problems that in the end turned out to be flexure problems. I wish I had moved to an OAG sooner!

One thing I did learn about OAGs is that it is much easier to find a guide star if the imaging scope has a wide flat field with little vignetting. Finding a guide star with my M703 at f/10 is easy as I can guide with a mag 10.5 star using 2 sec exposures. However, while using an Optec UWF 0.7X focal reducer the vignetting at the pick-off prism is too great to use. The Optec FR works well while using a guide scope but the vignetting is just too great to use with my OAG. It will be interesting to see if you have a similar experience while using a FR.

Have fun with the new toys!

-Eric

Great job, Tyler. You got the color perfect on this one.

Maciej Kapkowski said:

One of the things without any sense is to shoot DS object from the city...but sometimes people are doing things like that
Galaxy M 101 Ursa Major.
Location: Warsaw, Poland
Setup: FSQ-106 N, ST 2000 XM, Baader CCD LRGB filters, HEQ5 SynScan Pro.
L:4,5 h, R:1,5 h, G:1,5 h, B:1,5 h.
17.03.2010.
Hi res: http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/5359/finalcc.jpg

Maciej, nice work in difficult conditions! I could be accused of having no sense too.

Thanks for the comments Dan, Peter, and Tyler.

I gave one more shot with the RBG data and came up with this. Plenty of stretching required a lot of noise reduction to compensate for the Denver sky glow and I hope I didn't go too far. This version is reduced to 80% of original.

-Eric

wow, that is a nice set of images. Great work, Mike.

-Eric

Jim, that is another nice shot. The MN 152 looks to be a good match with your ST8300.

-Eric