I began to slowly process the material from my
8″ ONTC newton. Technically, this is not first light of scope, but rather first completed work. I wanted at the first process something dusty.
There were some nuances, during processing I realized that there is some miss-alignment of scope what I didn't notice right after scope setup. As a result, it was corrected only a year after the installation of the scope. It turned out that it makes sense to check the alignment in narrowband filter due to small star size what exacerbates any miss-alignment issues.
Another thing was a surprise from camera, on bright stars in RGB channels (RGB only) there is some “inverse blooming” effect, when bright stars have dark trails to the right of the star. These artifacts become visible only in the sums and only in RGB (they are not present in the narrowband and L channel).
Fortunately, it is easy to fix it during processing, and the camera itself. As the manufacturer's support later suggested, it can be adjusted to eliminate this effect (little potentiometer on camera PCB responsible for amplifying the signal from the CCD).
This image represent nebula called the Ghost Nebula (vdb141 or SH2-136). Nebula is over two light-years across and brighter than any other ghostly vision in the picture. The Ghost is 1200 light years distant from us. There are signs of contraction inside the nebula; we are probably observing the early stages of star formation.
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