Eastern and Western
Veil - NGC 6960, NGC 6992 and M33
Short Tube 80 F/5 on Celestron NexStar 5i mount
EQ Mode on Wedge
MX916 CCD camera - unguided
November 15, 2003
I had been looking at the Starlight Xpress website a couple of days ago and noticed that the picture of the MX916 showed the chip much closer to the opening than my camera... Then I saw that the description said that it came with a 2" and a 1.25" nosepiece. Hmmm. My camera arrived with the 2" nosepiece on it and the 1.25" nosepiece screwed into it. Betchya that's why I get vignetting! So I took out the 2" nosepiece and put the 1.25" on and now I have a shorter camera.
I guessed and was correct, that this would also allow me to focus the camera through the flip mirror with the short tube 80. That added to the convenience but as chance would have it, things were falling on the chip anyway. :-) I've had nothing but positive experiences when the ST80 is riding on the N5i's mount. I wish every object in the sky were large enough that I could use that combo solely.
This was a terrific evening because it got dark early, and my dh was home so I could go out by 6:30! The moon didn't rise for a couple of hours, too, which was an added bonus. Got the old scope set up, did an EQ North, wedge align and another EQ North and was ready for the camera. Don't you know it, I upgraded to the latest Maxim version and they seem to have broken the STAR2000 MX driver! It wouldn't connect to the camera when that driver was selected. So, I couldn't mess with autoguiding. I also seemed to be getting weird results collecting images over 60s with the current system so I reinstalled the previous version. I didn't nuke the new files and so the reinstall seemed to still have some issues, mainly, it behaved like a webcam at times, integrating a longer exposure and then failing to integrate the next one. However, it seems that this was an on-screen problem because all of the raw files looked good upon review. My next step will be to uninstall Maxim, nuke all files, and reinstall back to V3.1 and hope that solves everything. I suppose it is possible my S2K dongle broke, too but we'll see.
Anyway, I settled on doing only 60 second exposures, and decided I'd just do a lot of them. I'm glad I did because I actually have something to show for the time, for once. I shot only 3 objects - Western Veil, Eastern Veil and M33. The clouds began to roll in around midnight and so I turned off the scope and started taking darks. Don't you know as I was coming back out after trucking some things in, the sky opened up and was soooo clear and beautiful that I saw stars I'm sure I've never seen before! Oh well. I still stayed outside just looking up for a while, and then spent another 2 hours playing with the raws for a while and as usual, couldn't fall asleep afterward anyway.
Here's the Western Veil, NGC6960 which I shot first. I would have thought that I had enough images to bring out enough detail but I guess I didn't. These nebula are difficult.
Same goes for NGC 6992, the Eastern Veil. I think I overdid that one as it sort of looks fake :
Now M33 looks pretty good to my eye. I know there's more data in there but when I try to tease it out the image gets fake looking so I decided not to go any further. I'm actually pleased with this one.
