I have managed to engineer changes to the mount layout. The guidescope and apo have now swapped places and the old guidescope has been repositioned to give a lower centre of gravity. Although there are some issues with the remote control of the guidescope pointing that still need sorting the general balance is much improved. I decided to give it a trial run on M31 (The Andromeda Galaxy). What promised to be a clear evening was spoiled by contrail residue drifting across. Although I got a good number of subs most of them suffered from "pinking" courtesy of the haze. Getting a satisfying colour balance seemed elusive though I might experiment a bit more to see if I can get a better result. This is the full, uncropped, frame from the apo which shows the MPCC corrector working quite well in the corners. Details: Megrez 88 apo with MPCC. 14x 10 minute exposures @ iso800 with CLS in DSS, CS2 & XAT Image Optimiser.
2 comments:
Another superb image Pete. I'd been looking forward to seeing an image of M31 with the APO. There's quite a bit of detail in the arms, presumably due to the 10 minute exposures. It seems M31 is such a large object the tenuous edges fall outside even the relatively large FOV of your APO.
Simon
Thanks for the comment Simon. The subs suffered quite a lot from the general haze so I look forward to another try with a clearer sky. Skewing the galaxy from corner to corner should gain some more room if it is possible to get any deeper from here. Perhaps try some 15 minute exposures to see if it improves anything.
Pete
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