Another set of great shots. I notice a few images from before, which ones are the newest. Here in the northern hemisphere I'm at latitude 43 and by the time I get set up, polar aligned, focus and PHD2 guiding going its between 11pm and 11:30pm. I might be able to get 2 hours before packing up. I can't leave my rig out all night yet. Did you use a dual narrow band filter for the nebula or doest the 2600 pick up the red? I'm liking the results from the 2600mc. It was $500 more than my ASI071MC Pro when I purchase it 6 months ago. I suppose the file sizes are pretty big. Another channel that is using a C8, and Edge HD, is AstroAF. He just performed a corrector plate collimatation and showed how he did it. He has other good content. Give hime a try. He has a great video showing how he modded his HEQ5 with the Rowan belt system and he replaced all the bearings. His guiding is much improved and he's using the Celetron OAG dispite him living in a Bortle 6 area in the US state of Illinois.
@stevemiller31283 ай бұрын
Thanks, they are all quite recent as I have only had the 2600 for a few weeks and mostly new versions of each shot. In mid Summer here about 10:30 to 11:00 is the best I can do as I am at 42’ south but at the moment 6:00 to 6:30 is quit possible. No filter as they have gone missing in the post, so all natural colours the Swan is just one hour 20 x 3min I think but the Lagoon was a 2 panel mosaic set up in the ASIair each 20 x 3 min with a 25% overlap but due to the poor quality of the stars in the corners of the frame I decided to also use an earlier centred shot which I think was 30 x 2min but each stacked separately then combined in the panorama section of Affinity. It did a pretty good job as the middle of the shot effectively had 3 hours of integration where as the ends only an hour each. There was a bit I was able to crop out which helped. The three shots were across the nebula stacked on the vertical plane and then rotated 90’. The files are just under 50meg which is why I have switched to 3min subs to keep the volume of data down a bit for processing. I use a MacBook Pro with an M1pro chip so it has plenty of grunt. When I bought the HEQ5 I looked into the Roman belt but decided to see how well it tracked first and so far I am pretty happy. I plan on moving to an OAG soon with the 174MM that will free up the guide scope for my camera and lenses as well as letting me use either the 2600 or 533 as the main camera. I feel that I can still improve both the focus and alignment of the guide scope and that should improve the guiding performance. I have temporarily given up on dithering as it takes ages to settle and the guiding (average error) is much bigger at even at 3 min subs, I was using 60 or 120sec the settle time can be over 30 seconds and never recovers to the undisturbed