Ep 024 - First Imaging Sessions with the ASI1600MM Pro
This is the first few imaging sessions I ran with the new ZWO ASI1600MM Pro camera, recorded just before Christmas 2019.
The first subject, as always, is M42 - The Great Orion Nebula.
These images are pretty rough, given the LX200GPS was not guiding properly, and a lot of the images that were taken on the nights needed to be thrown away and did not make it in to the stack because of the guiding errors causing bad images. However, you do get a fairly good scale of how big an object M42 is in the sky, and how much "zoom" you get with a 2500mm focal length scope.
The second image was of IC434 - The Horsehead and Flame nebulae taken with the 80ED (at about 480mm) on the LX200GPS attempting to guide at 2500mm. This was a very long exposure (over 160 x 1 minute frames) - that is what was kept in the stack - many, many more were thrown away because of the guiding.
There were quite a few niggles in the setup beyond that, including some balance issues (which did cause problems in the guiding), and also the focal reducer that was in place on the wider field images was not mounted at the right distance, which caused a great deal of Coma (seen as the "warp effect" in the corners of the images).