Gso 10" 254mm @ f3.8 (965mm) with field flattener / reducer.

This is my first image taken with the technique L+RGB.

To realize this project I had to improve many things both in gears, and in data processing.

Probabily it's the most demanding image, in terms of evolving my technique; I had to exit my 'OSC comfort area' and face new solutions that until this time I always avoided for several reasons.

First of all, I moved my 294Mc Pro from the refractor (where I put to train with the learning curve after the purchase) to the newton 10" at f/3.8

Immedialy I had to deal with flats that are overcorrecting and/or some gradients (I had this problem also on the refractor but there it disappeared after some tests and reading tons of web pages on this topic - I know flats should be between 2" and 5" secs. I know also bias are no needed, but I finished using them, I didn't notice any difference).

I wasn't happy of the roundness of the stars and I found out that they were different in size from one side to the other of the meridian flip, so I bought a whole new set of springs, screws and knobs to stabilize both the primary and secondary mirrors of the telescope. I had to buy also a concentric collimator to improve the secondary mirror position. Using this and 2 other kind of collimators, I fixed the problem and now the collimation is kept in a wonderful way - it makes me happy. I put some pics of the setup in the gallery of this image.

Then I bought my first filter wheel, and I spent some time to find the right distance from the the flattener. But I noticed some stray lights (I shoot photo in my backyard near 2 streets in the city center...) so I had to DIY some coverage for the filter wheel and the primary mirror. It was much better but I decided to DIY also a shield light. Probably it helps a little bit against the street lights and those from the neighbors.

Now, the whole setup is about 22 kg and for the Neq6 it's not easy to deal with this and a telescope of about 1,5 mt. The guide wasn't good enought, so I activated for the first time the PEC of the mount, and it was better. But the problem is that I install and remove my setup each night, so I took note of the positions of the telescope and counterweights, to don't disallign the gears losing the PEC. So I started to install the gear without balancing anymore but using those marks... it worked.

In the end everything worked like I was hoping, and I was able to collect 14 hours of luminance and 2 hours of RGB (OSC) in 6 different nights with the same framing which matched almost perfectly.

I selected the best Lum frames, leaving out some blurred images, to try to improve the fine details, so I finished with about 12,5 hours Lum + 2 hours of RGB.

I'm not going to write informations about M95 and M96 because you know all about it, but I want to highlight the emotions of the whole process to try to 'bring at home' a view of the Universe, so far and so beautiful. This is the inspiration that moves all of us I guess, and I wrote the steps because sometimes the road is interesting as the result.

Thanks for watching and for reading the story of this image.

* Update, I ended choosing the crop image as final; even if I like more the field wider (because of the faint galaxies), I think it's more appropriate to the name of the image.

*Update 2: I uploaded the F version, where I calculated manually the distance of some of the most faint galaxies of this image.

It's not something scientific or exact; it's nothing more than a fun, but done in the spirit to be amazed that in our little pictures there is something so far away.

I had to stretch the image to enhance a little more those galaxies.

I also added some informations of the data of the image in the description, which I forgot to write.