Whew, it has been a long ride to get this image! I have been collaborating with two other astronomers on getting Sam Houston State University's neglected STXL-6303 mounted to the Takahashi Epsilon-200 for the last, oh, four months or so. I had to break down and order a custom, one-off adapter for the oddball 3" diameter mounting nosepiece of the SBIG... I was super nervous that my effective length calculation, 17.3mm, was going to be wrong and we wouldn't be able to hit focus. Precise Parts was super helpful and delivered a perfectly working adapter which easily hit focus. We were very excited when we saw focus jump out at us. Sadly, we couldn't image much that night due to a full moon and totally socked in skies full of clouds. Honestly, I can't remember a worse night for viewing... but we were there.

We went back out to the observatory for a near-new moon and breathtaking seeing conditions. Oh, and it was cold. And damp. But the skies! Our resident Tak expert spent about five hours trying to collimate the Tak. This is no easy task. I gave it a go many years ago, but I was quickly frustrated. Right around 11:30 he hit a spot with the secondary that give me decent stars. It was enough to get me the above image, but it's obviously not flat. We lack the proper manual and tools to collimate the Tak, so we're discussing sending it to LSS and have Fred work his magic. We'll probably try to give it another go in a lab setting with an artificial star before shipping it down to Houston.

We need to rebalance and polar align the NJP mount. Sad, but even with a guide scope my images needed a FFT align as the mount wasn't tracking as tightly as I'd like. The stars are arched when stacked without alignment.

It's probably been around six years since I've processed an astroimage, so this took process much longer than I remember. The software now is so much different, but the toolsets available now are fantastic! I'm enthralled with Carboni's Astronomy Tools for PS. They take a little work to get used to, but the time/effort savings is extremely nice. I've also discovered that I like stacking in CCDStack2 much more than I like MaximDL. You have more control over the process and you get to review the metadata while working. Fantastic!

For this image, I combined the 6 frames of 900s and processed as normal in Photoshop. Once I was happy with that, I combined the remaining subs and focused specifically on bringing out the core data. The resulting image of this second process is dark and very contrast-y, but I did a masked overlay of my first processing image and this really brought out the details lost around the core. The trick is to use a heavily feathered grey instead of white for the mask.

I managed to pull more out of this data than I anticipated, given our collimation and tracking problems. I'm still happy with the result and I'm looking forward to using this unique setup more often.