With a forecast of 5 hrs I hoped to get the rest of the frames for IC 417 tonight. It was still missing [O III] and with luck still a little RGB for the stars. In fact, it remained clear even longer, so I could also connect two more H-Alpha frames. With over 18 hours now, however, really enough time has been invested. However, the object still turned out to be difficult to work with.

After almost 10 days of foggy weather, finally a few nights where clear. Although the moon is still very bright, I try to continue the mosaic project of Sh2-240. Recently the FSQ annoyed me with slightly deformed stars in the lower corners. Somewhere there must still be a tilting inside. To exclude a focus problem, I activated FocusMax again, which I had not used for almost a year.

The Supernova remnant Sh2-240 fascinated me for a long time. Unfortunately it is very large and does not fit my chip at all. So I have never imaged it before. After an astro colleague at the Astronomicum Forum showed an 8panel mosaic of it, I was fire and flame and ready for my first mosaic experiment.

After almost a week of high fog the clouds today finally broke up again. I still had an incomplete project with M78, but the conditions were anything but good. Most of the objects on my project list are located in the south and then quite deep. In the uncertain weather situation, I decided to prefer a narrowband object, the faint emission nebula Sh2-232.

In the last cold nights I had serious problems with the EQ8 mount. In certain positions on the west side of the meridian, she did not want to go all the way to the finish position, but instead started to crack or yelp from a certain position. On the basis of various tips and advice from the forums and from the dealer, I tried to solve the problem about the adjusting of the DEC gap. I will show you how to do this in the video.

The last two nights showed again a large cloud-free zone over the Bremen area, which I used for further exposures with the Takahashi FSQ85 and the new camera. First, I made a comparison of the 460Exm and the 490Exm to see if there are differences between the two chips. On paper, the SONY ICX 814 sensor of the 490 is regarding the full-wave capacity with 12,500e behind the Sony ICX694 chip of the 460s with 18,000e.

The new Takahashi setup with its own camera and filters is almost complete. So I have put the FSQ85 into operation and used one an a half clear nights for a few shots. The Tak is now operating with an Atik 490Exm with 9 megapixels. My actual destination M78 is unfortunately very low and is in the field of view only for about 3 hours per night. Correspondingly, the data at the end was very weak. After all, the FSQ is not a f4 system and has only an opening of 85mm.

Older blog entries >