Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  M 101  ·  NGC 5447  ·  NGC 5449  ·  NGC 5450  ·  NGC 5451  ·  NGC 5453  ·  NGC 5455  ·  NGC 5457  ·  NGC 5461  ·  NGC 5462  ·  Pinwheel galaxy
M101 - The start of DSO imaging on a C14 Edge HD, Phil Hoppes
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M101 - The start of DSO imaging on a C14 Edge HD

M101 - The start of DSO imaging on a C14 Edge HD, Phil Hoppes
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M101 - The start of DSO imaging on a C14 Edge HD

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Description

Thought I would post this for a baseline of my progress for the future.  I focused on M101 last the night before after my success with M97.  I still have a long list of to-dos with respect to fine tuning my C14 DSO workflow.  When I planned this setup I assumed I would need to use OAG with the longer focal length of the C14.  There are some challenges in doing that.  I think because I have an AP1600AE mount I can take an alternate plan to DSO and focus on dec-arc modeling and scrap guiding all together.  The issues I'm seeing is 1) I have tried on multiple nights just to get an OAG to see stars and I've not been successful.  The long focal length I'm sure has a lot to do with that, but for the moment OAG for me is a no-go.  I don't see that improving especially because my setup is an urban setup so I will always have Bortle 6-8 skies.  2) The new C14 Edge does have mirror locks and they "kinda" keep the mirror from moving but not really.  So far, the best fix for this I see is lots of intermittent autofocus sessions.  I did that last night on a different target and it worked quite well.  This fix for mirror flop, however, also runs counter to OAG since you lose your guiding when you are doing an autofocus. If I tried this then I would have to recenter after every auto-guide session.  Possible but not ideal.  The Dec-Arc model path is quite promising as I don't need to worry about guiding at all.  The initial time spent building a model I have to believe is less that the time I would spend doing continuous repointing.  I will still need to concentrate on autofocus but there are some solutions to that also that I want to look into.

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