Yesterday out of nowhere some stars stroke me after cloudy day. But the joy was short-lived, soon humidity reached 99% and some haze came out. Nevertheless I opened my astro shed and decided to spend some time on fine tuning setup with new QHY163M camera. There were still some unfinished business with flattener distance and tilt. I gave up on filter wheel dovetail and replaced all clamps with threads. In the optical train there is now only one short rotator. Then I took for adjusting flattener distance, and during this process I shot some photos. Conditions were really tough, NELM was something around 4mag, sometimes in very zenith maybe 4.5mag.
First one is not so often pictured NGC6940 open cluster in Little Fox constellation (close to famous Veil nebula). Picture below is LRGB composition with 30 minutes of luminance and 3×15 minutes of RGB channels. Made with Photoline 130 refractor on EQ6 mount.
Full size here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/NGC6940-fin40.jpg
Fortunately I am almost there with correct distance, only one more 0.3mm spacer to test. Currently curvature in corners is really minor, as you can see at the 1:1 crops below (picture scale is 1″/px):
After adjustments it turned out that its alread after midnight 🙂 So I pointed telescope to NGC7635 Bubble nebula with H alpha filter and took a nap. After few hours I checked frames and of course half of them were cloud polluted. So I gathered total 12 useful frames 10 minutes each with this object:
Full size here https://astrojolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/N7635H.jpg
Clear skies!
