Last nights M42

Hey all,

Clouds broke for 45 minutes or so last night (finally) so I tried M42.

It looks like the problems with the Sac camera have been fixed by adding a USB amplifier cable to my notebook. So if anyone gets horrible vertical R, G or B lines in their Sac images this is what fixed it for me.

Anyway, it was very low in the sky at around 20 degrees so had to throw out more than half the shots because the guiding couldn't keep up with the terrible seeing conditions but it turned out nice in the end. Guidestar just jumped about constantly.



Consisted of 2x2min & 2x3min shots.

Sac 10 imager
William Optics Megrez 90FD
ASGT (CG5GT)
Guided with PHD, GPUSB & NexImage

I also had a bunch of 10 to 20 second shots of the Trapezium but haven't merged these yet. Tried a 5 minute shot but blooming became an issue.

Any suggestions more than welcome.

Trev

Trev - nice colour and nebulosity there. Any idea what the star halos were caused by?

Dave

Gorgeous image Trevor. Looks a bit soft in terms of focus but it's still a lovely image.

Yep, the focus was out a bit. Could see the clouds in the distance and rushed it :oops:

I've been trying to find out the cause of those halos. I'm not sure if they are caused by the imager or something else. I know that doing a DDP, for instance makes them much worse, but they are present in my raw file on the trapezium stars and Theta2 Orionis.
Depending on the amount of processing I do they can look really ugly. I'll need to check the sac group for this.

Cheers guys,
Trev

Great image there Trevour. Nice detail and colour. I thnk the blue halos are from your optics/camera. Is the scope an apo as it may be chromatic aberation. Also is this a colour cam or is it an LRGB image. Try using an IR blockking filter for your L channell or just for all your images if it's a color cam. AIP for windows has a filter that gets rid of this.

Dave Gradwell

Good one Trevor, looking forward to seeing more.