Well FINALLY there have been a couple of clear nights that I have een able to get the scope out and try some imaging. Not that it hasnt been without its frustrations and and problems....
As most know we have been plagued by the weather this summer and even when there has been a break in the clouds it has not been for long. All the setup has come in bits and pieces as small breaks have allowed me to first do the polar alignment then the GOTO alignment, all of which I ended up having to repeat after I loaded up the scope with the camera and then decided to swap to just the 102 mm refractor for wide field imaging instead of having the dual mount RC and refractor as it just seemed like too much weight for the mount and i was having issues with the equipment coming into contact with the pier as the mount slewed round as it was all spread too wide. Last thing you want to do is run your nice ne CCD camera into the pier.
So it took a little while to get familiar with the software and th whole image capture and processing thing but i finally got there. I did try first with imaging M31 the Andromeda galaxy and while i did get a bit of detail and it was possible to see the gas clouds and the definition of the rings it was pretty much a full moon that night and it washed out so much of the detail that it wasn't worth wasting too much time on it other than to help me lern the process.
The next night proved to be much more sucessful although it ended with some hardware problems that caused me to pack up without achieving anything like what I wanted to but at least getting enough data to make a start at something even if it doesnt have the ammount of detail I would like.
I took the following image with an SBIG STF8300 CCD camera mounted to an Altair Waves series 102mm/f714 ED triplet refractor. The image itself is not shown in true colour as I used narrow band H-Alpha, SII and OIII filters. Really I would like at least 4 hours of data to make a good image but due to a hardware problem (my mount decided to slew round at full speed on the DEC axis all on its own for no reason and its not the first time!) but instead i ended up with just 3 x 300 second subs in H-Alpha, 3 x 300 second subs in SII and 2 x 300 second subs in OIII which were all then dark and bias subtracted.
After aligning, stacking and color combining the images using MaximDL5 I used photoshop to tweak the levels a little to help bring out the color more and get better definition in the gas clouds. The nebula itself is the Heart Nebula snd the bright part in the center of the image is the Open Cluster Melotte 15 which is a young star cluster at the heart of the nebula.
