383L - Eta Carina / Gabriela Mistral / Gem Cluster

[Kaidan]

Hi,

NGC3372 (Eta Carina), NGC3324 (Gabriela Mistral) and NGC3293 (Gem Cluster), taken from "Piton Maïdo" (2200m), Réunion Island.

First full image with the Astro-Tech AT65Q (which is a triplet lens with one lens corrector, 65/420, 44mm corrected field) which was suffering "square stars" upon reception. I disassembled the whole optical tube, removed the corrector and tried to lower constraints on it. The stars are now better but still not as round as it should be considering the 2.65"/pixel scale. Sky was not great (cloudy / fog till midnight, lots of high clouds).

ATIK 383L+ (-15°C) on Astro-Tech AT65Q
Losmandy G11 Gemini II guided with SX Lodestar on UltraSlim off-axis guider
Acquisition with custom software, guiding / dithering with PHD Guiding 1.13
Processing with PixInsight 1.7

L (bin1) : 20 x 240s ; RGB (bin2) : 3 x 5 x 240s = 2h20 total.

Full can be seen on my website : http://astrophotographie.re/NGC3372.13.03.09/NGC3372.html

[bwa]

Wow!  Like it a lot!

bwa

[Lex]

Hi Jeremy,

Really nice take, congrats on this!
How did you calibrate your subs? Flats, darks and or bias's?

Best

[Kaidan]

Thanks for your comments.

For the calibration, i did 15 bias and 9 dark for each binning. As usual, no flat (the two tubes doesn't really show any vignetting with the 383L+ using 36mm oversized filters and it seems i have no visible dust on the CCD so far...). The big corrected field (> 44mm on both OTA) allows me to put the off-axis guider really off the main CCD).

[Lex]

Hi,

Man you are a lucky one; no donuts --> that's like a dream 
Ok, with an optical path clearance of 44mm the prism of the OAG can be pushed all the way outwards!
My next workhorse will also have a bigger clearance!

Best and congrats again on your nice image!