NGC 6188 - Here be Dragons! (John Dziuba)

NGC 6188 - Here be Dragons!

This is first light from my new rig deployed at Obstech in the Atacama desert in Chile. The rig consists of an Officina Stellare RiDK400 with my FSQ106 piggybacked on top of it. It is all mounted on a robust 10Micron GM4000 mount. I just came back from a trip down to Chile to set it all up and was excited to finally start collecting data.

There is a lot of tuning yet to do before she is running up to spec, and we are in the teeth of the Chilean winter where conditions are less than ideal. Seeing conditions this week have been between about 1.5" and 3" with most nights having intermittent high thin clouds. Certainly these conditions are not conducive for the high magnification RiDK400. However, for my FSQ106 reduced to 380mm and f3.6, seeing conditions are much less of a drama. So first light from the rig is from my trusty FSQ106.

The resulting image is not as clean as I would have liked. For one, it was shot during a nearly full moon. Also, I forgot to change the gain back down to 0 and the super fast f3.6 optics with the reducer and 10min exposures overpowered the sensor a bit in my opinion with the extra moonlight causing the images to be a bit washed out, even with the narrow band filters. At least I think that is what happened. I may go back and re-shoot the O3 when there is no moon to test this theory as that seems to be the most affected channel, which makes sense.

However, this initial mini project served its purpose as a test image. I am building a list of modifications I want to do and settings to try so I am ready for the start of the best imaging season later this year.

Fortunately, this is a target that I will never get tired of. It is known as the Fighting Dragons of Ara and lies roughly 4,000 light years away. Last year's version was shot with half as much integration time on my mobile FSQ85 rig from the Australian Outback. This version is double the exposure time on considerably faster optics and more aperture. Next year I will dedicate a really serious effort towards it.

Thanks for stopping by.

Original
Final
D
E

Southern Hemisphere Astro
Takahashi Refractors
PixInsight Addicts
Dark Nebula
ASI 6200 MM Pro
Fine Art Astrophotography

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8227123
PixInsight job	BLEKANVHSKJW6YT0GFXVOVLJZ7F3UNAJ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	16h38m47s.12
RA (top/left)	16h50m11s.32
RA (top/right)	16h43m11s.99
RA (bottom/right)	16h28m01s.85
RA (bottom/left)	16h33m58s.62

Dec (center)	-48°32′58″.4
Dec (top/left)	-49°59′30″.1
Dec (top/right)	-46°19′00″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	-47°02′17″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	-50°46′11″.3

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):