First Light with new scope - M13

Heres an image I took with my new Skywatcher 127 Mak Cassegrain scope. I was pleasantly surprised by this image of M13 since it was quite low in the murk at the time.



Details:
127mm Maksutov Cassegrain on EQ6 Mount.
Canon 300D at ISO 1600
30 Seconds
Processed with Paint Shop Pro7

This scope looks like it will be great for imaging.

Hi Dave,
Thats a grand image, what kind of light pollution conditions do you "enjoy" in your location.
Would be possible to get a longer exposure shot,
Is the mount able to track well for long lengths of time?

Nice one Dave G. Was this one 30 second exposure? If so, guiding on the EQ6 seems to be pretty good.

Cheers

Dave McD

Hi Dave,
Thats a grand image, what kind of light pollution conditions do you "enjoy" in your location.
Would be possible to get a longer exposure shot,
Is the mount able to track well for long lengths of time?

Hi Dave(s),

I'm in North Dublin, so as you can imagine Light Pollution can be severe. However my eastern and part of my southern horizons are not far from the sea so It can be pretty good on occassion. On Sunday night when I took this photo it wasn't that great. I didnt do a limiting mag test but I'm guessing it was about 4ish.

I have DSLR focus and built the long exposure cable so I can do longer exposures. On Sunday night I was just interested in testing the new scope so I didnt bother setting up the laptop etc. This was just manually focussed. I think I got luck with the focus rather than any great design. In fact on the originasl image you can see the focus is a little off. However on this sized down version it doesnt look too bad. On the next good night I'll whip out the laptop and do some longer exposures and focus properly. I'm really looking forward to having a go at M51.

As for the mount, its a slightly modified EQ6 mount. I've replaced the thrust washers on the worm shafts as these are the wrong type. Wth the new ones there is absolutely no axial play at all. The only backlash would be from mecanical misalignment of the worm and wheel. I also replaced the whole drive system with a System 5 unit from AWR technology. This serves a couple of functions. It eliminates the vibration inherent in the standard EQ6 drive motors. Also it employes high quality gearboxes which help smooth the whole deal even better. I'm looking forward tio seeing just how it performs over a longer timescale than 30 seconds.

Tyhere's too many Dave's on this post! :lol:

Dave G - thanks for taking the time to expand the info. I do believe that water is better than land, in terems of heat currents and so on. Unfortunately, the only water I have is a big puddle in the back garden...

I was driving back to Dublin Sunday night and certainly in the Midlands, the sky looked superb.

Given that you manually focused, this is a good image. I'd imagine that if you spend the time focusing 'scientifically' that you can expect excellent images from your new scope. And since its a 127mm, you'll get really nice wide field images - I look forward to seeing more - especially M51. I've been trying to imaging it but I'm guessing my exposures are off or the ETX guiding is off - I just get a pretty starfield. When the 1200GTO mount comes though, I'm hoping to be able to factor out *all* tracking and GOTO issues

As for the EQ6, you've done a lot of work on it. And it sounds like you know your stuff and are able to improve the mount substantially. I hope you'll find that you can get good tracking over minutes rather than seconds. Do you use any PEC software? That might be handy to eliminate even more error in the mount.

Best of luck and keep us posted!

Cheers

Dave McD