RC Test - NGC884 (Star & Bkgd work) (Bradley Watson)

RC Test - NGC884 (Star & Bkgd work)

I have owned my RC for near on a year and produced one image that showed a lot of evidence for a need for collimation. I have found not only collimation a difficulty but getting the OAG to work with the scope was somewhat of a challenge, these types of scopes are not for the faint hearted!

I fell into the trap of assuming that eye balling collimation using an eye piece collimator was sufficient. Although looking through the collimator showed everything being lined up, under the stars I think I could have used my scope to look around corners! The assumption here also was that the scope was mechanically perfect when produced, this is not so. Once I had taken a deep breath and accepted that some clear nights for imaging were going to have to be used to fix this - steps in the right direction happened. The collimation is not spot on but it is showing promise. This image is a series of subs unguided so I think the result is not so bad, stars are a little soft.

The other challenge has been the OAG, hence testing without guiding. This I believe I have solved but will test this in a next session.

With my scope and camera combo, I have a resolution of 0.56 which gave me thought to try binning 2x2, with limitations on seeing and the mount mechanics it may make sense. I tried this comparing 2 sets of data against each other, the BIN1 seemed to be better with smaller stars (possibly due to less light sensitivity). The jury is still out on this so will continue to investigate. I would love some thoughts and views on this.

Anyway I think the scope is showing some promise and I have made collimation changes since this image showing an improvement of about 10% on HFR.

Looking forward to getting this scope up and fully imaging.

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Astrometry.net job	7060382
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RC Test - NGC884 (Star & Bkgd work)

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RC Test - NGC884 (Star & Bkgd work)

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