Very lucky to have some clear skies again last night 🙂 Managed to get some imaging done on the Merak region with the new Esprit ED-100 quintuplet refractor. Two frames here, only half an hour per frame using 3-minute subs, so nowhere near enough subs for a pretty picture, but plenty enough to test out the refractor.
I didn’t spend long enough to get good chip flatness or good collimation, but it was well within the limits I usually pick for imaging. Stars are a little soft because I didn’t have the IDAS filter in-line, I have only just sorted out the optical train to do that around 5-minutes ago. Three positives come out of this exercise. One – no vignetting with their camera adapter! Good shaped stars corner to corner across an APS size chip. No lens flare from Merak despite all that glass in the objective. So they did do their sums right – well done Sky-Watcher!!
I now need to fit the IDAS filter into the train (this might introduce some vignetting due to the way I have to do this) and then I need to image an extended object with some longer subs, hopefully I’ll still be able to see the Flaming Star nebula next outing.
However – so far, so good.
