Much Has Happened, Little Has Been Written

 Last entry was mid January, it's now mid May. Looking back over the months, I've been able to image about 14 times on deep sky objects and, oh, several times on the moon. Some was experimentation, the rest, as usual, to see if I can get a decent image. All imaging has been with the Stellarvue; the Meade remains “forked”. For now, I can't see a huge reason to change from just the Stellarvue. For imaging on the moon, I can get at least as clear images (possibly better) and have a little more flexibility in that the field of view that matches the Meade is achieved by using a 3x Barlow lens. Remove the Barlow and I have another, generally good clear, focal length/field of view. And the transition takes less than 30 seconds.

It's been interesting learning a new mount and telescope. Skies are generally worse, being closer to a Bortle 5 or 6 rather than a 4 or 5. The light pollution really shows up in the images. However, one important lesson learned is that I need lots of flats and darks (calibration frames). By lots, I mean at least 45 each. I've also added another (as yet unused) filter, a 12nm wide Hydrogen Alpha. Shooting flats with it requires about a 5 second subframe (compared to subframes measured in tenths of a second for the other 4 filters). Shooting the flats (and flat darks) takes about 2 hours now compared to 15 minutes at the observatory. That said, I've worked out a method of shooting them inside instead of on the mount. I can set up the sequence in NINA and leave it to run unattended.

I guess by now you might want to see what I've got. So...

Good guess, it's the moon. However, it's a mosaic of 10 images in the original, so zooming in reveals a lot of detail. Not so much here, since I had to reduce the size from 400Mb to something much less. Sorry.

This gives an idea of the level of zooming available in the image above, and this is down sampled by a factor of about 10. It's tilted so that it, sort of, aligns with the moon as seen from earth without a telescope. The area is of Sinus Iridium.

M37. Light pollution gives it a color cast (greenish) that I haven't been able to remove. But...

NGC2175. This is an emission nebula that would be perfect for the H alpha filter. Still, it's not too bad. For a beginner, that is.