The so-called fair weather catastrophe in October has largely remained stuck in Bremen. There were some nice late summer days, but no clear "nights" throughout. The originally planned two objects, VdB 152 and M45, became only one. I had visited the Pleiades only briefly and so far I did not have an appealing photo in my collection. I wanted to change that. With the epsilon at f3.3, I expected a deep result with little exposure time.
My original primary target, VdB 152, I could forget after some luminance shots. It was simply too moist and opaque in the sky for such a weak object. Apart from that, I first spent some time to get rid of a tilting at the camera, which I had turned back into the desired position after turning the camera for the previous picture of LDN 1235.
So I switched to M 45, the Pleiades. The first night with the CLS filter for the luminance was quite good in terms of the result, although I had to give away a few hours, because the meridian flip didn't work out automatically at 3 o' clock - where I had been in bed for a long time - and the mount lost tracking the guiding star.
here is the result of the luminance:
In the following night the color should come. Unfortunately, the weather turned into clouds after sunset, and also the Astrodon filters, which produced unattractive large halos around the bright stars, made new problems. The few color frames of the second night were therefore almost useless. Luckily, I was able to solve the halo problem a few days later by exchanging the filters from the Newtonian to the Epsilon. The older Astrodon Gen1 filters equipped with a fast system such as the Epsilon seemingly susceptible to halos, the new Gen2 filters are not. On the FSQ85 I never had any problems with it, even with the Reducer in f3.8! This suggests that the epsilon collects and concentrates significantly more light than the FSQ85, a fact that is quite deliberate :-)
Halos: left Gen1-Filter, right Gen2-Filter
In the third night the conditions for colour were favourable and I could collect a few hours. Here is the color raw image:
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