NGC188 and Environs from a Dark Site (Michael Feigenbaum)

NGC188 and Environs from a Dark Site

I have access to a dark site, Bortle 1 near Puertecitos, Baja California in Mexico. I have wanted to get down there and do something for quite a while and finally got an opportunity.

Puertecitos is a fishing village with 41 residents about 180 miles (290km) south of the US/Mexico border right on the Gulf of California. It is hot in the summer and there is some humidity as would be expected with its location adjacent to the sea. There is no electricity there but surprisingly, there is an excellent internet service available. I use a Bluetti portable power station that is also equipped with solar panels. This is the 716wHr version and it really works great. It had power to spare even after two nights of work.

I thought getting started with this would be best accomplished using a simple rig so the Samy 135 plus the ASIAir and the AM5 made a lot of sense. Easy to set up and get working. When it gets dark there, the shear quantity of stars that are visible is so extreme that is almost disorienting. To me, things even appeared to be 3-dimensional.

Anyway, even though it is a bit low in the Northern sky, I thought I would try something like this NGC188 in hopes of catching some true IFN along with the open cluster and I was pleasantly surprised. Since it is so dark, I went with 3-minute exposures with the lens wide open at f/2. Could have gone much longer I would imagine, there were no gradients in the master at all.

I like the resulting image but I don't particularly like the stars. It looks like I have a little tilt in the train, likely from the ZWO Nikon adapter, may have to look for a better quality adapter or try to make this one work better and drop it back to f/2.8 for the next try.

Hope you like this one! Comments and criticism always welcome and Clear Skies with good health to everyone!

Original
Final
N

Cloudy Nights
Samyang 135 f/2
Open Star Clusters
The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
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Deep sky
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Backyard
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Own remote observatory
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Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8093793
PixInsight job	3JFTAVE62F4HTYZR1C88J60UVJ2IMIID
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h41m31s.18
RA (top/left)	22h14m47s.53
RA (top/right)	23h43m24s.63
RA (bottom/right)	01h23m17s.61
RA (bottom/left)	03h25m16s.35

Dec (center)	+85°17′28″.0
Dec (top/left)	+87°40′29″.3
Dec (top/right)	+82°30′25″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+82°18′37″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+87°08′13″.5

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