First Light Images for a new Astro-Tech AT60ED telescope. Nice 360mm F/6 doublet with FPL-53 synthetic fluorite and Lanthanum lenses. I bought the 0.8x Reducer/Flattener that goes with it, too. It gives you a 288mm F.L. at F/4.8 with that combo. Resolution is still good at 1.72 arc sec/pixel with my camera.

These objects are the Eagle Nebula, Trifid and North America Nebulae.  All were taken with a QHY183C camera at gain 20, -15C cooling and a cheap no-name UHC filter from a metro area, Bortle 7-8 zone.

Not too bad for a session from the metro LP zone!  Only 96 minutes, but it was enough with these settings to show quite a bit of nebulousity.  I used the unity gain setting (11) and that made a big difference in hot pixels and noise.   My other shots at a gain of 20 were plagued by hot pixels that SharpCap 3.2 doesn’t seem to be able to deal with very well.  I like this much better and there is just as much data buried in there as in the higher gain shots.

I am still working on the Heart Nebula mosiac I started shooting the first few days of the new year.  Plenty of work left, but I at least have a more complete image at this point.

Over 4.6 hours of integration with a variety of exposures including 3 min, 2 min and 30 sec sub-images. All were taken with a QHY183c camera at -20C or -15C cooling, an Optolong L-eNhance filter and a Televue TV-85 at F/5.6.

thors-helmet-25×180-g20-o100-lnh-qhy183c_-20C-85f5_6-crop plus thors-helmet-30×120-g20-284×30-g37-o200-lnh-qhy183c_-15C-85f5_6-v2a

The December 26/27 weekend of 2020 was the last imaging session of the year.   I managed to bag good data for all the objects on this page.   The Heart and Soul Nebulae are still works in progress, though.

I had a little trouble with streetlights and two satellite trails for this shot, but I salvaged what I could.   I like the way the 3 minute sub-images are working out, though, now that I’ve tuned the guiding to get usable subs at that exposure setting.   That exposure seems to be the sweet-spot for this camera and filter combo at my location.

Below is the image above, but with data add in from my last imaging session of it from a full moon night on Halloween, 2020.   I like the way the portrait and landscape versions had diffraction spikes at 90 degrees to each other:

What started out as a quick imaging session to just take a look at this turned into a multi-hour session.   I did 3 one hour stacks and one with 45 minutes, with one of those 1 hour stacks shot with the 30 second subs,   A nice haul of good data that was easy to process.