North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80 (Pat Darmody)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg) · Contains: NGC 6997 · NGC 7000 · North America nebula · The star 57Cyg

North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80, Pat Darmody

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North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80

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North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80

This is my first image with my new Skywatcher Esprit 80ED. I have not owned a refractor since I was a kid. A lot has changed since then... A huge thanks to Tom Robbe and Barry Wilson for the great advice regarding refactors. I also very much appreciate all of the help and support from Dave at Highpoint Scientific. They are very good people to work with.

I am enjoying the Esprit 80. The images were bright and crisp. It's also a lot easier and quicker to do a sky align and polar alignment at 400 mm FL than it is at 1280 mm ... Guiding was a little off, but not too bad. I am still getting used to the different balance point of the Esprit 80 on my AVX mount. The small brown splotch in the upper left seems to be caused by my flat frames. I shot a lot of different flats with various exposures and ISO values using the daytime t-shirt method. I will try some different flats to see if that helps.

All in all, I had fun last night and I am looking forward to taking the Esprit 80 out for more!

Version B: I shot some new flats today and that fixed the problem with the brown streak in the upper left corner of Version A. It also helped color balance in general. I suspect that my original t-shirt flats had some wrinkles that made the input light uneven in the flat. I was more careful today and I will post my t-shirt flat setup as a gear photo.

Version C: PI processed, no LHE used. All noise reduction done in PI.

Version D: PI processed, LHE used to enhance detail and brightness of nebula. All noise reduction done in PI.

Thanks for looking!

Original
B
C
Final
D

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Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	569766
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North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80

North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80

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North America Nebula - First Light via SW Esprit 80

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