Sunday, 31 October 2010

I see 410

IC410 is the little patch of nebula in Auriga that I used to test the autoguiding mechanism of our big scope. I used 1 minute exposures; we previously had success with 5 minute exposures, but I was playing safe. The flat field pictures I took afterwards using a diffuser and skyglow seem to have added a lot of noise to the picture and it still required more tinkering with the background, hence the patchiness. I'll have to play around with using false or smoothed flats. This picture used 17 x 1 minute exposures at ~ f/3 on the 20", darks & flats. The Sky Quality was only 20.66 mag/sq" (a bit disappointingly light), which didn't help. This was taken after the successful (see 'littlebeck') 5 x 5 min picture of the centre of IC 405.

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