Project Dumbbell (Andrew Burwell)

Project Dumbbell

Link: https://www.macobservatory.com/blog/2021/7/19/project-dumbbell-first-light-with-the-rainbow-astro-rst-135e-and-edgehd-8

This image is the culmination of effort into a project I started months ago. My goal was to put together a long focal length highly compact travel rig. I had been using the RST-135 mount with a 100mm refractor. But I wanted to image galaxies and small targets with the ease of that setup.However the +/- 30 PE of the mount made it difficult to guide longer focal length scopes fast enough to correct for that error.

I invested in a new mount by Rainbow Astro, the RST-135E. A Renishaw encoder model of the same light weight compact mount. The new mount has +/- 2 PE over the course of a cycle. With the lower PE I could consider a longer focal length telescope like the 8" EdgeHD. Of course to prep it for imaging, I had to also invest in a Moonlite focuser. Thankfully I had a ZWO ASI294MM-Pro with filter wheel and Astrodon filters going unused. Putting this all together I end up with a pixel scale of .67".

My guiding RMS had to come under that pixel scale to not see the effects of tracking error, and the result of this combination is that RMS during poor seeing on this first image was .64 total RMS. I think overall this was a successful endeavor. The resulting field of view is slightly smaller than my EdgeHD 11/ASI6200 setup, and is now making me question whether or not I need to keep that rig along with my 10Micron mount.

Original
B
C
D
Final
E

B

Description: The new imaging setup. I'm able to carry this outside without disassembling it. It literally takes a couple of minutes to polar align and I'm ready to image.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Screenshot of the PHD2 log for the evening showing the .64 RMS guiding at 1442mm focal length with an OAG and ASI174-Mini guide camera.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: I added an additional 40 each of HA and OIII 5 min subs. Then I reprocessed the image. Each filter I processed to enhance contrast on the core because OIII was so strong it was overpowering any detail from HA.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9458302
PixInsight job	EMSZFJ87AEXPL056E3R556I0SXJM8TXR
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	19h59m35s.760
RA (top/left)	20h00m52s.930
RA (top/right)	20h00m23s.584
RA (bottom/right)	19h58m18s.182
RA (bottom/left)	19h58m48s.165

Dec (center)	+22°43′30″.43
Dec (top/left)	+22°24′42″.10
Dec (top/right)	+23°06′56″.38
Dec (bottom/right)	+23°02′16″.60
Dec (bottom/left)	+22°20′02″.62

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