Ad Astra Observatory

Pumpkin’s field flattener showed up last night. It’s a 0.8x reducer, too, which I didn’t really want, but I’m dealing with it.

I didn’t do a great job at focusing (just eyeballed it), so I don’t have a full report. Also, I didn’t guide the image (I figured G-11 should be able to hang in there at 320mm focal length), so I lost a couple of frames to trailing.

From what I’m seeing, the field’s still not perfect. stars in different parts of the field are smaller than in others, leading me to believe that the field is still curved somewhat. But it’s a *lot* better. I have some sample images (still unprocessed) of the same region of sky, so that I can compare the “star wars” looking stars in the corners without the gizmo to the stuff from last night.

The thing has just a sick amount of FOV, though. The North America Nebula easily fits inside the vignetting cone. M31 is going to be about the size of your M51 image. Maybe slightly larger.

So I’ll get those half-dozen shots I want; NGC7000, Veil, M31, M45, IC1396, Rosette. And then the scope can go back to being a guidescope.