Hello all,
this photo is deep sky object #4 since I started this wonderful hobby back in August 2020. Images were taken during November 2020, and my first edit was not really good. Now that I've gained more experience with both PI and GIMP, I feel happy about the result (considering equipment and location!), and I've therefore decided to upload it
Taking this image from my Bortle 6.5 location + SkyGuider Pro + terrestrial lens has certainly been a very painful but worthy experience, and I'm really glad I did it. I really learned a lot during all these sessions.
Of the 4 sessions I did, the 3rd went really really bad. Everything that could go wrong, went indeed wrong. Long story short, out of 230 lights only 86 were kept.
All images taken at 350mm and f/6.
Major issues I faced:
* using a bathinov mask didn't really help much. I was able to achieve better focus without it (HFD calculation using ASTAP backed me on this)
* on nights 3 and 4 the outside temperature had quite some difference between the start and the end of the session, therefore I had to manually refocus every 60/70m.
* the dew heater set to "high", with an outside temperature of around 0 C, emptied the 26800mAh power bank in ~3h. Luckily, I had more with me.
Special thanks to:
* APP: it was able to stack perfectly all the sessions. I had quite some drift between frames and between sessions. But it did a wonderful job.
* ASTAP: back then I was using it to check focus every 30m, so this helped a lot
Side node: it's really funny to read about all this stuff months later. I'm really glad I kept a log book. Also, I'm really glad I bouth a quadruplet and, most importantly, the CEM70
This winter I will give it a go again, but this time with better equipment and knowledge. Really curious to see how the final image will look like!
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