Contains:  Extremely wide field
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6 objects one night: EdgeHD11 Hyperstar and ASI183mc 5.3 hours exposure, Freestar8n

6 objects one night: EdgeHD11 Hyperstar and ASI183mc 5.3 hours exposure

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
6 objects one night: EdgeHD11 Hyperstar and ASI183mc 5.3 hours exposure, Freestar8n

6 objects one night: EdgeHD11 Hyperstar and ASI183mc 5.3 hours exposure

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This is a test of my new ASI183mc color camera and Hyperstar on EdgeHD11. I attached the Hyperstar and camera at sunset, aligned it reasonably well - then exposed 25x30s for Omega Centauri, then 30x2m for each of: Centaurus A, M83, Trifid, Lagoon, and M16.

The system was autofocused every 30 minutes using the primary focuser, and guided with a Baader 60mm Vario-Finder/Guider. There were no clouds that evening - and all exposures were used with 100% yield.

I calibrated and stacked the exposures with my own code and did not use a deBayering step. Instead each pixel is drizzled into its appropriate color channel. As a result there are no deBayering artifacts, and no loss or corruption of color by some kind of color interpolation. This is inherently no different from using a mono camera and separate R, G, B filters - except that the OSC filters are a better match to human eye response - and there are two G pixels for each R and B.

The images have been minimally processed - just combined in Maxim with some gradient removal - then levels and slight color adjustment in Photoshop. No cropping at all - so you see the raw information - and all objects at the same angular scale.

This was largely a test of the camera and how it worked with different types of deep sky objects: galaxies, a globular cluster, emission nebula, dark nebula, and reflection nebula.

I image from a suburban location and a streetlight is very nearby - so I used a Hutech IDAS LPS D1 filter. I think it helps here but I need to explore it more. A sky meter says my sky overhead is 18.6 mag/as^2 but it gets brighter away from the zenith.

The montage was created with ImageMagick - and each frame was reduced to 50% size in the process.

Comments

Histogram

6 objects one night: EdgeHD11 Hyperstar and ASI183mc 5.3 hours exposure, Freestar8n