NGC 6960 (Cyg)

NGC 6960 (Cyg)

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Date/Site: August 19., 22. and 30., 2009, AAR-observatory in Presberg
Exposure/
Filter:
Luminance 12 x 10 minutes (-12°C)
I 7 x 10, red 3 x 10, green 4 x 10 and blue 8 x 10 minutes (-15°C)
Camera: SBIG ST10XME, motorized Atik-filterwheel with Astronomik-RGB-filters
Optics/
Instrument:
4"-TMB-refractor on the Gemini 41 Field mount of the AAR
focusing by hand with the aid of MaximDL 4.6
deblooming, darks, alignment and stacking: MaximDL,
levels and curves: Photoshop CS.

During three nights in August I captured several series of the cirrus nebula first with O3- and Hα-, then with LRGB-filters.
After the first night all my Hα-images were trailed. There had to be a solution for this at last! After all I had a lot of well aligned and collimated high-end-gear at my disposal but the results still were disappointing.
Fustrated I searched for hours in the MaximDL-forum. There had to be others with the same guiding-issues! In the end I found a step-by-step instruction by Douglas George of Cyanogen and with its help guiding worked with sub-pixel-accuracy.
Before the test had the impression of a slight inaccuracy of the club's G41-field mount, but that proved as unfounded.
Autoguided photography with the club's instrument has the advantage of parallel observing throught the 13"-Newton. Just waiting while the laptop works flawlessly gets boring.
Because of the lack a reference-point on the OAZ for the camera's position the images are rotated with respect to each other.
In the third night I misinterpreted the filterwheel-position for the blue-filter, so I used the Johnson-I-Filter instead. Although I swapped this for the red channel the object in the end was already a bit low for the green-series, so this channel is comparatively noisy.
During two nights the venerable Canon 300Da with the kit-lens ran along piggyback and recorded the milkyway in Cygnus.

© Friedhelm Hübner, last revision:  03.12.2023