First light on Iris Nebula with my new ASI071 (Göran Nilsson)

First light on Iris Nebula with my new ASI071

Finally we have some astrodarkness up here, almost three hours of it. So on Friday night I could test my new ASI071 MC pro (a cooled APS-C sized OSC). First hour went into polar aligning and star aligning the EQ8 on the pier (it has been stored inside over the summer). Earlier in the afternoon I had managed to get rid of most of the backlash by finally being brave enough to fiddle with the Dec gear. So then I had a bit less than two hours remaining for imaging. I hooked the camera onto my Esprit 150 and set it on gain 90 (unity gain), offset to 20, and chip temp on -15°C. I started with an hour of 2 min exposures and then 1 min exposures. In the morning I found that the first images looked quite bad and realized I must have had dew on the camera window. I had missed to tick the anti dew box in the ASICAP programme. Fortunately, the dew spontaneously went away after about an hour so I ended up with 9 x 2 min + 24 x 1 min = 42 min of imaging. I think it looks promising enough. Very little noise in this camera. I did do darks but they were very clean and probably not needed.

Earlier in the day I had also figured out that my Dell Windows 7 computer could not handle PHD2 (with a QHY5LII) and ASICAP for the camera at the same time. I think it was the PHD2 (or the QHY) that messed it up or some USB crash. So I ended up running the ASI071 on my Mac Powerbook.

I feel that I learned a lot even if I did not get great deep data. The EQ8 did rather well especially since it was essentially pointing the scope straight up, with RA and RSM between 0.5 and 0.8". Next time I will tick the anti-dew box and image for longer, maybe with a bit longer subs.

Any comments most welcome especially regarding settings and exposure times for this camera.

Original
Final
B

The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
ASI 071 mcc

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2222442
PixInsight job	U1Z4RVH2YYXKO1H3YVTRFG5Y43P9CIRS
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	21h04m23s.59
RA (top/left)	21h02m39s.76
RA (top/right)	21h12m16s.50
RA (bottom/right)	21h06m14s.56
RA (bottom/left)	20h56m37s.100

Dec (center)	+68°18′16″.6
Dec (top/left)	+67°34′58″.2
Dec (top/right)	+68°27′03″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+69°01′30″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	+68°08′03″.6

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