Had a go at the orion nebula yesterday. First outing in a long time, just 30 x 5min exposures, with some Ha. Here is the first stab:
After a day or two, I decided to look again, and see what we can pull out of the data. Two and a half hours of capture roughly equates to about 1 Gigabyte, so there is a lot that can be done. Here is the final that I will settle with on this acquisition:
So, is it Flattner or Flatenner…
We don’t know, all I know is that it flattens the field to a image sensor, this is the SkyWatcher Field Flattener which is matched to the Esprit 120ED Pro, the main sensor is a CMOS ASI1600MM Pro in my case.
Here is the video:
So we had a brief night of viewing, and as this is likely to be the last time using the StarTravel 120T I thought we would end where we started, with Andromeda.
The results are not great, it is a Luminence only capture, with a mono camera, a mosaic of three panes, and you can clearly see the egg-stars caused by the chromatic aberration that the StarTravel exhibits. The StarTravel gets really good results with Narrowband imaging, but not when trying to get true colour. I intend this to be the first target with the Esprit soon, and hopefully we will see quite a difference to compare the two against each other – you need to be reminded that the Esprit costs probably around 8x more than the StarTravel, and everything I’ve posted here so far was achieved using the StarTravel.
I have not bothered to perform much post-processing on this image, as I feel more compelled to focus efforts on new equipment, and hopefully better results.
We can compare that, with my first ever astrophotography photo, although I believe this was LRGB at the time, so avoided the worst of the chromatic aberration by re-focusing for each colour filter.
This is just a quick video going over the Esprit 120ED Pro, together with the Sesto Senso 2 focuser, and comparing it with the StarTravel 120T with the SkyWatcher DC Motor Focuser.
And a quick look at the included accessories with the telescope
OK, Well the Esprit 120ED Pro has finally arrived. So a few unboxing photos, which I will follow up with a video comparing the upgrade from the Achromatic StarTravel 120T to this new Apochromatic scope, in particular testing out the Sesto Senso 2 on the Esprit, and comparing it with the DC Motor on the StarTravel.
I am told that there should not be any difference between the ED100 and the ED120 focusers, they are the same model, the only difference is the sticker, which I will either remove, or it might drop off with dew in time.
This is a quick video to look at viewing equipment on our side of the focuser – diagonals, eyepieces, and looking specifically at the Baader Planetarium Hyperion Zoom MkIV eyepiece.
Essentially how to avoid going down the route of eyepiece collection explosion, get a single eyepiece that adequately provides the views at all magnifications that your equipment can reasonably cope with.
We are looking at the SkyWatcher (or Celestron) PowerTank 17ah, for use at dark sky sites away from home, to provide a constant 12V, upto 10A power over 17Ah of powerstaoge.
Obviously neither SkyWatcher nor Celestron manufacture this product. Here we show what its form factor capabilities are, and I will update you in time with how they perform: