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 06 November 2004

by Christoph Petermann

The night of the 6th November 2004 was a wonderful and clear night with low winds and low humidity. I decided to take my Vixen 102M refractor outside and additionally the 150mm f6 Newton. I did not have any guiding facility available so the equipment should run "free". I worked hard on polar alignment, which really payed out. The first image I tried were the Plejades with the refractor and the C8 focal reducer. I made 4 images with 5 min exposure time each. But already on the tiny images on the camera I saw the coloured circle around the bright stars. Then I changed to the Newton scope and did the same on the Plejades. The difference was visible at once. I carried on with M31, M35, Flame nebula and M42. Down to the south east to the Orion area at that time sky is polluted by light of the city of Kiel about 20 km away. Sky background became very bright and I am already thinking of getting a filter to eliminate street light emissions. I have seen 5 min is to long for to let the GP mount run free. I will reduce to 2 .. 3 minutes next time. I am working on a guide scope for the Newton.

I made one big mistake: I made all images in JPEG mode. I thought it would work with JPEG too, but it did not. The DARK fields I made did not really subtract from the target image. Next time I know better.

So the images below are a crop from single images. I believe there is high potential in the camera. I have ordered ImagePlus from Mike Unsold which can control the NIKON D70. There is plenty of stuff to play with inside that software



Single RAW Image of M42


M42 treated with ImagesPlus. Combined Average of 4 images.


The Plejades M45 Combined Average of 4 images.


Flame and Horsehead. This is a Combined Average of 2 images.

Instruments:


 Text and All Images are Copyright by Christoph Petermann DF9CY

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