Monday 17/09/18

Plan

  • M33 with 0.6 focal reducer and filter on 130 900mm newt.

Site

  • Cottenham, Cambridgeshire, UK
  • Class 4 bottle
  • Weather
  • Pressure: 1007hPa
  • Wind around 7kph.
  • Temp Around 18C.
  • Dew point 10C.

Log

Tonight was one of those nights where my rig decided to work, more or less perfectly, from the off and surprisingly the weather played ball as well (although the forecast looked pretty dire to start with).


My home made focuser seems to be working well. The interface is a bit clunky at the moment and I’ve still got to plumb it into an ASCOM driver so it will work with the auto focuser stuff in ATP but it worked well manually.
Also my little set of sensors  seemed to work well (or well enough for my needs anyway) giving pressure, temp and dew point.


I was running with my new (cheap) focal reducer which brings my focal length down to about 517mm.
First off I ran a 30 shot series of 60s exposure on M33. That seemed to go well so I upped the exposure time to 2 minutes and ran another 30 shot series.


Since it was about midnight and M45 was in view by then I took a few bonus shots.

Results

Turned out not to be great after an amount of post processing. There’s some vicious vignetting from the focal reducer which my flats don’t seem to want to get rid of. Since I’d left the equipment setup and the focus constant I’ve been experimenting with flat fields. Hopefully this should pay some dividends.

2 thoughts on “Monday 17/09/18

  1. Scott says:

    uuh, dad, lemme say something:
    i got redirected here like this: so first i was trying to make a javascript redirect on my site, and it gave me a 404. this was probs dodgy coding. i went back to the page that redirected you, and got put here. weird huh? no need to fix anything, love u!

    Reply

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