M14

2023-07-08 0 comment(s)

The last couple of nights have been AMAZING! I've recently bought a dedicated astrophotography camera, the ZWO ASI 533mm pro. It's a 1-inch sensor mono-camera, so no colors here. Though I've many years ago had used dedicated astro cameras (Meade DSI and Meade DSI Pro), the development since then is insane and there is simply no comparison. This is also the first COOLED astro camera I have (well that's actually not true either, I had a Meade 216XT over 20 years ago, but never got that to work, so it doesn't count). When I bought this camera, I also made sure to couple it with the ZWO AsiAir, which is a tiny mini-computer used specifically to control the camera, mount and guiding and integrate all of that together. Everything in regards of setting up the equipment (focus, polar alignment, autoguiding, photographing) is so easy now. Just take the simple example of doing a polar alignment. I could not do this very well as I'm photographing from a balcony, but the AsiAir has a nice function for all-sky polar alignment which makes this possible. All of the steps associated with astrophotography is much easier now using the AsiAir, and the stuff that normally took me many hours to do I now do in a few minutes. After practicing for a few nights, it now takes me less than five minutes to setup all equipment and get going. It's really a game-changer. I very much also enjoy the fact that the camera is cooled, as it's much easier to do calibration now as I can simply take darks in advance and have a library of darks that I can use for a very long time. Honestly, it feels like I've taken as many pictures the last 3-4 nights as I've taken the last 10 years before that. The thing I love about this photograph (other than it showing a beautiful globular cluster) is that it's reaching magnitude 18, which is not bad considering I'm photographing from the middle of a big city and using only a 71mm refractor.

Date: 2023-07-08 / 22:47:43 UTC
Location: Munich, Germany
Temperature: 15 °C
Telescope: William-Optics ZenithStar 71ED
Camera: ZWO 533MM Pro (main) + ZWO 178MM (guiding)
ISO: 101
Mount: Skywatcher NEQ6 Pro Synscan controlled with ZWO ASIAIR Plus
Exposure time: 61 X 60 sec
Reducer/flattener: William-Optics 0.8X reducer/flattener (P-FLAT-F6)
Other info: Calibrated with darks and flats. Guided with ZWO 178mm and 50mm guidescope. Main camera cooled to -10 C.
Processing: Integrated and processed in Pixinsight 1.8.