Ad Astra Observatory

A,

M16 sure is one of my favorites. I like a nebula that has some structure

to it!
It looks like your time was limited by blooms, rather than sky fog. It
would have been nice to see this image go a little deeper.

The final image has too much unsharp mask; that’s why there are little
black halos around all the stars.

The 2 RGB images are very nice, but the green channel didn’t line up
right, and also the stars are sort of yellowish.

The LRGB has a ton of data. What did you use for L? Clear? No filter?
Ha? I’d shoot the crap out of the thing in Ha and see what you can get.
What’s the moon doing right now? I’ve been in cloudy Hamburg for 10 days
without so much as a glance of night sky.

All told, I like cut 2 the best, but I’d re-align the green channel and
see if I could get the stars looking more 240, 240, 240 and less 240,

240, 128.

Try to get shots of the Lagoon M8 and Trifid M20. The Trifid in
particular will have plenty of detail, although there’s a very bright
double star that you’ll have to work around. The Lagoon is gigantic —
be prepared to take some test shots and then carefully frame it, much
like M42. Both are really bright, though. Check my website for some
30-sec images of them from my backyard. Moses Lake should produce much

cleaner results.

I need to get myself to a place where I can “just shoot” again. Every
scope I have needs some work before it’s ready to roll. If I’m not
jet-lagged out of my brain, I’ll try to collimate Trixie when I get home.

I don’t know why I’m bothering — I have to get the top plate installed

before I can do any serious work. Also, I need to figure out a
finderscope. Given the constraints I’m working under, I’m thinking that
I will just attach an L-bracket to the bottom ring. It would be easier
if it was the middle ring, but that wouldn’t help my balance equation
any, since the balance point is behind the middle ring… I have a
feeling (justified only by a spreadsheet) that the guidescope will be a

nice, movable counterweight. That should be able to overcome any
imbalance caused by the finder. If I wanted to break up the “clean” look
a little, I could install a pair of new tubes, centered in the upper
edges of the rings (ie, just like where the bottom mounting plate is, on
each of the other 2 sides of the triangle), and install the Telrad on
one tube, and the powered finder on the other. Then I could in theory
slide them fore and aft to help with eye placement and balance, and also

they’d offset each other’s weight side-to-side. I might switch to a
Rigel QuickFinder (although I love my Telrad), because of the smaller
footprint.

ooooh. I just had a crazy idea. It’s probably too crazy to work right. I
could install *2* more mounting plates instead of 1. Then I could
install the guidescope on one, finders on the other, but on the
finder-side one, I could swap in a widefield camera or something. It

would be *cool* to have someplace to mount extra stuff. Probably not a
good idea, though — there’s no way to really tune the side-to-side
balance properly, and the guidescope weighs 8#, so it would be
significant. hm.

I think I’m back to the L-bracket idea. I just wish I could mount a
finder that I didn’t have to crawl around on the floor to look through.

Maybe I’m about ready for a right-angle finder… or maybe I just mount
to the middle ring and tweak out the balance with the guidescope.

That should work.

Anyway, I have some work to do before I’m ready to start shooting again.
Another summer wasted.

J

Art Morton wrote:
>> M16, the data is RGB and LRGB. The data is presented in different
>> ways. The last image is he version I like the best. M11 was low on
>> the horizon and the seeing was not that good, so it is what it is.
>> No flat-fields were used to calibrate the frames so there are a few
>> artifacts in these images.

>>
>> These images are both from Moses Lake Washington.
>>
>> Enjoy