The Good, the Bad & the Ugly 12/3/19

[Hankmeister3]

First ...The Good: I took my Guan Sheng 8-inch f/5 Newtonian out last night for its first light. Though its factory collimation was a bit off (despite dealer assurances their telescopes are "perfectly collimated") I thought it performed well despite the comedy of errors on my part, the various hardware glitches, an abortive attempt at field collimation, and the turncoat weather window. Though only six images were salvageable, I thought the evening was well spent verifying the general quality of the Guan Sheng optics despite the setbacks I encountered throughout the night.

The Bad: I set up late so I had to do most of it in the light of the Moon and my car's parking lights. It took twice as long but I wasn't too miffed because I had plenty of time to kill before the Moon wasn't a factor any more. Forecasts had clear skies throughout the evening at my Penfield site but that proved to be false. High cirrus clouds popped up now and then without warning, and the Jetstream was playing havoc with seeing conditions. Probably a Pickering 3 on average. The skies started out nicely transparent and relatively dark (Bortle 3) and then got worse with each passing hour. At the start of the evening I could still see the Milky Way despite the Moon glow. There was suppose to be "very light and variable breezes" throughout the evening but those turned into 15 mph gusts to my dismay and to the ruin of about 80% of my images. I also had power supply issues. After about two hours I had to swap out my newest power supply - 75,000 milli-amp/hour, 330 watt lithium battery) for my trustworthy EverStart lead acid battery power bank. I took that opportunity to perform another polar alignment before I fired everything back up because my first alignment was off by two to three minutes on both axis and I thought I could do better. Wrong! I should have left it alone because I had to perform yet a third PA which still wasn't as good as my first.

Then to add insult to injury, I found I had forgotten to activate the PPEC tracking for the next twenty frames after the second alignment. But apparently the Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro's standard sidereal tracking isn't too horribly bad since the M42 image was actually one of those frames shot during that time. It's a 90 second exposure. About six weeks ago I had noticed an improvement in regular sidereal tracking after taking out the lash between the worm and pinion gear plus I think I've run the mount enough to where the gears have properly lapped themselves in to one degree or another though lapping worm and main pinion gear will generally NOT remove a significant amount of periodic error. However, I think this set of gears has minimal PE to correct.

The Ugly: The ugly was most of the images I grabbed last night, especially those which clearly registered the effects of buffeting breezes with dancing stars replete with little squiggles and oblong mid-brightness stars. And ugly was the frigid weather combined with strengthening breezes will still more clouds on the western horizon heading my way when I decided to throw in the towel. Mama didn't raise no fool!

None of these represent the best I've done to date, but I thought they were respectable. Unfortunately the best Horsehead /Flame Nebula image was actually a centering test-shot made at ISO3200. However, all images are single-frame, no filters with exposures between 60 to 90 seconds. I was using my Canon EOS 80D which fortunately worked flawlessly.

[Lady Fraktor]

Nice images all in all, thank you for posting them

[helicon]

They look really good - excellent results.

[MariusD69]

Awesome! Well done!

[Ozypic]

[image][/image]Great images for sure thanks for sharing them .

[Hankmeister3]

Thank you m'Lady Fraktor, your compliments are always appreciated.

And how goes your star gazing of late?

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks, Michael. I hadn't expected these positive responses to what I thought were simply okay images for a first light christening.

[Thefatkitty]

Nice deal Henry, those really came out well despite it all, I think

Always worth trying!

[Juno16]

Those are really cool images Henry!

You sure can pull some great color out of these single frame shots. It’s really amazing!

You definitely overcame your setup issues admirably.

Sometimes my worst imaging stops produce some of my better results.

Excellent work!

Jim

[SKEtrip]

Good Stuff! - I'd take it, especially for a "first flight".

[Hankmeister3]

Thanks Mark, Marius and Jim. Your compliments are very generous.

Jim, I think you're right. I can't put a name to the principle involved, but on some nights it's like nothing wants to cooperate and your equipment is conspiring against your best efforts and you drag yourself home in the early morning hours in quasi-defeat thinking "another night wasted", and then the next morning when you review your image captures you find a piece or several pieces of gold in all the muck. Frankly I was surprised I found one useable frame much less three despite previewing some of them on site.

I can see some interesting potential in that GS 8-inch Newtonian given the scale it yields at prime focus and its relatively fast f/5 ratio. Now I'm going to have to seriously collimate the beast.