The other day I got an e-mail from Dave Kriege of Obsession Telescopes. It turns out he is going to be distributing an English version of the Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas.
There are a number of very appealing features of this Atlas, not the least of which is that it looks great. The deluxe version he will be distributing is also printed on plastic and is completely waterproof. While looking at some sample pages, I noticed an interesting looking object called CTB 1. Since the objects shown are supposed to be visible in large amateur telescoped, it should be able to be imaged.
I looked around and sure enough there were some images of it and it continued to look like an interesting target. I decided it was going to the front of my to-do list.
Sunday night it finally cleared after a long spell of bad weather. The forecast was pretty iffy but it did clear up, and even better, it stayed clear the entire night. Since I suspected this one was on the dim side, I took a test shot at 5m binned 2x2 with my 7nm Baader Ha Filter. There wasn't much there. I decided on 30m subs binned 2x2. That was a new record sub length for me, but the equipment held up. All told I ended up with 8 hours total integration time.
I think this is the dimmest object in HA that I have imaged. I hope to add more HA to it.
I looked around and sure enough there were some images of it and it continued to look like an interesting target. I decided it was going to the front of my to-do list.
Sunday night it finally cleared after a long spell of bad weather. The forecast was pretty iffy but it did clear up, and even better, it stayed clear the entire night. Since I suspected this one was on the dim side, I took a test shot at 5m binned 2x2 with my 7nm Baader Ha Filter. There wasn't much there. I decided on 30m subs binned 2x2. That was a new record sub length for me, but the equipment held up. All told I ended up with 8 hours total integration time.
I think this is the dimmest object in HA that I have imaged. I hope to add more HA to it.
It is also worth mentioned that I was experimenting with a different spacing of my CCDT67. Experiments by Richard Flynn seemed to indicate that the field would be a bit better corrected if I increased my spacing slightly. I added a 1/4" spacer to my existing setup and went from .93 arc-seconds per pixel to .955 arc-seconds-pixel (binned 1x1). At least binned 2x2 as here, the result looks very promising. Here is a view of the corners and center using the AberrationInspector script in PixInsight. Not much to complain about, especially given the 30m subs.