Wednesday, June 3, 2020

NGC 7000 - North America Nebula (Equipment Test)

So this is the North America Nebula (NGC 7000) and the Pelican Nebula (IC 5070).  Both area emission Nebula residing in gassy and dusty region in the constellation Cygnus.  I decided to image this 5 minutes before starting as this was mainly an equipment test.  This is just a 1-hr image with my modified Canon T3i (600D).  If I planned to image this I would have captured Ha and combined it with the color data. All did here was bunch of messing around in PixInsight and Photoshop.   

If you have been following some of my recent posts or Youtube channel you will see unsuccessful attempts at the dark and dusty region around Polaris my Canon 200 mm lens. So what did I test here?  The lens was piggybacked on my Orion ED80 Telescope which was mounted onto my Atlas Pro mount.  In addition, I used a new after market ring bracket for the camera lens so the whole camera setup is balanced better than it was when it was mounted on the camera.

I have successfully used this lens with the modified camera on the iOptron SkyGuider Pro but for the Polaris region you need to to have really accurate tracking as well as autoguiding.  I thought I was good to go however, my previous attempts were without autoguiding.  At first I used the SkyGuider Pro but there was drift.  I then used the piggyback setup with the the Atlas pro but Televue bracket came loose and it still looks like there was drift.  I tried a third time with camera directly attached to the Atlas and still some drift.  I did some research and discovered that imaging around the poles is actually quite difficult and you do indeed need to guide.  

This setup with the new bring bracket worked really well.  This 1-hour 60-second exposure image of the North America Nebula was success.  Although I was not guiding the stars were nice and round, much better than I achieved before with this lens and there was no drift.  I was not guiding using this setup as I need a few more items to get it working but the setup as is works.

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North American Nebula (NGC 7000) and Pelican Nebula (IC 5070)
Location: Home Monroe, CT
Date: 5-31-20
Camera: Canon T3i/600D modified
Lens: Canon EF 200mm f/2.8L II USM
Focal Length: 200mm
f/3.5
Mount: Orion Atlas Pro
Filter: None
Autoguiding: none
Exposure: 61 x 60s
ISO: 1600
Processing: DSS, PixInsight, Photoshop, Lightroom

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