Ring Nebula M51,
with SAC8 and Konus MotorMax 150 |
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| On couple of clear nights in October 2004 I tried to take images of M57, Ring Nebula using Konus MotorMax 150 and SAC8 camera. Only on the second night I was able to get "reasonable" tracking for the telescope and got few images out of few dozens that were of acceptable quality. I subtracted dark frame in Photoshop (somehow Registax didn't do it for me.) Then I stacked them in Registax. | |
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Interlace seems to be a problem in hi-res mode of SAC8. I downsized the image to hide horizontal lines. Stack of 4 exposures 12 sec each. |
| Due to light pollution my attempts to
take color images with RGB filters failed miserably. Red
channel looked all washed out with background. Making
sure that tracking is still good when using filters was
nearly impossible. Nevertheless overall results are rather encouraging. With flip-mirror diagonal I was able to parfocalize the camera and the eyepiece. Finding and centering the nebula was much easier in parfocal configuration. Tracking remains a problem though. Some links: M 57, M57 through different telescopes, HST view of Ring Nebula, and some more on Ring Nebula. |
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| It seems like long exposure ability of SAC8 will remain under-utilized in light polluted area and with tracking that could be imporved quite a bit. Overall setup time for SAC8 is rather significant: too many connectors and additional power source are not exactly fun to deal with. | |