M44 New OAG Test Image (Jim Raskett)

M44 New OAG Test Image

From Bessier-Objects.com:

Messier 44 (M44), also known as the Beehive Cluster or Praesepe (the Manger), is an open star cluster in the constellation Cancer. Praesepe is a bright, large cluster with an apparent magnitude of 3.7. It lies at a distance of 577 light years from Earth. It has the designation NGC 2632 in the New General Catalogue.

M44 is one of the nearest open clusters to Earth and can easily be seen without binoculars. It appears as a blurry patch of light to the naked eye. The cluster is best seen in binoculars and small telescopes. Occupying an area 95 arc minutes across, it fits in the field of view of binoculars and low power telescopes. Larger telescopes reveal more than 200 stars in the cluster.

This image was the first guiding test for my new off axis guider setup.
I have been plagued by very poor lp and seeing, so my guiding performance has been suffering lately.
I decided to try an oag at the suggestion of the PHD2 Forum.

This was my first semi-successful test, but there were severe issues. I saw four separate duplicated star panel images in PHD2 and the resulting total rms error was 0.2-0.3 (arcsec/px) which was entirely crazy and unrealistic.

After changing from the ASI (Camera) ASCOM driver to the ZWO ASI Camera driver in PHD2, the issue looks to be resolved. Possibly some type of driver incompatibility problem with my new ASI220 mm mini camera. The 220mm mini seems to be an excellent camera for my setup.

This image is from the 4-panel (0.2-0.3 rms) night. Just 62x 60 sec (one hour) of test images.
60 second lights is way too long and resulted in saturated star cores, but my main goal was to guiding and dithering with the new oag setup.

Also first time using synthetic flats in Pixinsight. Works great!

Since this is my only image of M44, I decided to post it.

Thanks for looking!

Jim

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9565299
PixInsight job	VV9AXU37M3LOTQVNUMGXGXKUU1TOIN1L
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	08h40m17s.17
RA (top/left)	08h38m20s.50
RA (top/right)	08h38m16s.90
RA (bottom/right)	08h42m13s.69
RA (bottom/left)	08h42m19s.55

Dec (center)	+19°39′05″.7
Dec (top/left)	+20°09′52″.2
Dec (top/right)	+19°09′14″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+19°08′12″.6
Dec (bottom/left)	+20°08′49″.8

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