The Leo Triplet
March 8th, 2010
A bit of a work in progress this as I don’t have enough light frames as yet, but here is the first image from the new mount :
The Leo tripet is a small cluster of galaxies sitting next to each each in the constellation Leo, they are M66 (top left), M67 (bottom left) and NGC3628 (right).
This is the first image using the new CGEM mount and the second image using the CLS CCD filter and it shows a few problems. Visually the first problem that I see is the colour balance, this is a direct effect of using the new filter which has shifted the colours way over into the blue and I’m having trouble working out a good method to correct it.
The second problem is the slight stretching of the stars along the RA axis, this is primarily a result of periodic error which I need to work on. I’ve gone back to using guidedog for guiding on this image as guidemaster was giving me a lot of issues, it still needs a bit of fine tuning. I also want to test out the guiding facilities in EQ Align to see how that deals with the mount.
Also as a direct result on the horrible street light over the garden the images all had an awful amount of gradient in across them, happily however Pixinsight was able to deal with that problem. I’ll have to remember to stick my big cardboard box over the light next time.
