Wednesday, February 11, 2015

First light with MCX

Last night was my first opportunity to use my new MCX camera. Setup was pretty easy and I slewed the scope to see how the cam would work with the Orion Nebula. Here's the result of a 3-second integration:

 
The image was well-resolved, but completely lacking in red--the dominant color in this nebula. I tried to adjust using the Miloslick software, but to no avail. I then selected Miloslick's reset option for the camera and normal color was restored. I got a tantalizing glimpse of the nebula in its full-color glory before the clouds rolled in. Unfortunately, I was not able to get an image. 

I reprocessed one to the green images in monochrome, and it shows a lot of subtle detail. The mild cooling of the MCX peltier worked well and noise was considerably reduced. All in all, I'm very pleased with this camera.


The Horsehead Nebula

This image of the Horsehead Nebula consists of just over 4 hours of total integration time. Stacked and processed in Siril, GraXpert, Affini...