My new RC8 First Light ! (Jérémie)

My new RC8 First Light !

These pictures are not the "true" first light of my new RC8 : it was so miscollimated than I could not take a picture.

It took more than a week before I could get my hands on a Howie Glatter and perform a better collimation. The - poor - results are the pictures of Polaris w/wo Bahtinov mask and the Tiger's Eye Galaxy.

I was very excited when I saw the spikes around Polaris !! Diffraction spikes really brings something to astro-pictures (maybe like if it was taken from Hubble ! :-)). But then I checked other stars and tried to image my first galaxy... I could see my stars were not perfectly round - and that REALLY annoyed me - and that guiding at 1620mm focal length with an OAG using my ASI120MM Mini was difficult... Plus probably a missed polar alignement. Anyway, I couldn't even register the few frames I got before the only star visible for guiding was lost and the field of view jumped everywhere !

You can see one of those sub of the Tiger's Eye Galaxy on the bottom of the composite.

So I decided to use my AstroPhysics 0,63x reducer, to get more light and facilitate the guiding. I tackled the Jones Emberson 1 / Headphone Nebula, and... it wen't better than for the galaxy !

I have to work my collimation, again, until I have perfect stars, but at least guiding was working and I could get 4 hours of the planetary nebula with 2 minutes subs on Ha (could only get that, because, as I you can see in the middle image, my view on the sky is quite closed !). I will try to cumulate Ha until I have sufficient details and less noise, and then start Oiii, and a bit of RGB to get star colors.

To be continued (but now, 15 days of bad weather are forecasted).

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