Small Magellanic Cloud – Rokinon 135 mm f/2 first lightEvery astro-photographer will at some point face that wonderful moment of the first light of a new setup, involving many technical tests that, as a whole, seek to refine details in search of optimization of the complete system.
And when everything is already working and the technical tests return results within the expected standards, it is time to decide the first project with which the setup will begin its life under the light of the sky.
Well, as a “Cluster One Observatory” team we decided several months ago to put together a wide-field system that, offering an extended FOV, would not sacrifice much of the spatial resolution function in the optical train. For this we decided to use the renowned Rokinon 135mm F/2, which when coupled to the ASI294 sensor offers us an amazing FOV of 8.2 x 5.5 degrees, which is perfect for mapping extended areas of the sky. And as the first project and as a definitive test, we decided that the “Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)” will perfectly suit our needs to become the first astronomical project for this new setup.
The observations were obtained during 12 nights between November and December 2023 distributed in 3 blocks:
- Block 1
2023-11-12, 2023-11-14
- Block 2
2023-11-22, 2023-11-23, 2023-11-24
- Block 3
2023-12-06, 2023-12-07, 2023-12-08, 2023-12-09, 2023-12-10,2023-12-1, 2023-12-12
We're very pleased with the outcome of this 348 light frames of 300 seconds, adding up 29 hours of observation distributed in two filters.
Processing notes:
As for every HaRGB image that we've done in the past, the processing workflow was the same: process the two images separately for merging both at the end. This one though, was different and harder to do than others.
The SMC is such a bright object that, or is it narrowband light only or RGB light only. Broadband emission is so bright that it makes it very hard for the narrowband data to be visible without already saturating the luminance levels, so a different HaRGB combination method had to be used.
This time, with both images processed as usual, instead of merging them in Pixinsight, they were merged in Photoshop as a "screened" layer with the aid of a paint brush that was used through a layer mask to reveal and enhance the areas that needed such treatment.
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