Last night was the first opportunity I’ve had to test some of the improvement work that’s been happening on the 20″. I had some early problems with icing in the Atik and a dead ethernet connection (someone had plugged a cable into the wrong port). Once these were resolved I started with NGC 7814, an edge on spiral galaxy in Pegasus.
Exposures were 10x 2 minutes, binned 1×1 with 5 second guiding exposures. I had to reject 2 images due to star deformation.The icing problems with the camera trashed my sky flats and I didn’t have any suitable dark frames so the images were hot pixel filtered before combining.
NGC 7814 is about 40 million light years away and is sometimes known as ‘The Little Sombrero’. Apparent size is 5.5′ x 2.3′.
The second image was less successful. The target was NGC 7479, also in Pegasus. This time I attempted an LRGB sequence but many of the images showed jumps in the altitude direction. It may be that the altitude drive is slipping at certain positions. This will require further investigation. Here’s the 15x 2 minute luminance frames.
