H-alpha clouds in Cygnus

I finally had another so-so night where I could see a few stars, so I was able to test the system with the 35mm chip of the STL11K. The weather here has been terrible with lots of cloud cover and haze from fires up north in Canada. During one 3 hour period I was able to get some testing done of the 130 GTX and Quad TCC attached to the STL11K camera, all mounted on a Mach1 mount.


Here is the result of only 3 x 15 minute exposures of the H-alpha clouds in Cygnus:


http://www.buytelescopes.com/content/images/thumbs/0066461_hydrogen-alpha-region-in-cygnus.jpeg


If I can get a few clear nights I plan to shoot a 9 panel mosaic of this entire region.


Rolando

Hi Roland, That's Beautiful! I notice you are in Rockford. Decades ago we made many trips from Rochester, NY to Rockford to visit a machine shop that had a BIG coordinate-measuring machine. We would show up with a truck-load of equipment and assemble our custom interferometer that was about as big as a full-sized van. We would calibrate the interferometer on the CMM there and then return to Rochester to characterize space hardware. We made numerous such trips because calibrations had to be done both before and after use to assure that it was (probably) in-cal when we used it! I did the optical design and build of the device. Nearly all of our interferometry was required better than 1/100 wave RMS SP HeNe with a repeatability noise floor of 1/1000 wave! We eventually got our own Big CMM. Now I'm retired and looking at the stars. Tom Dey