StarTools

Finally finished building my new 8” f5 Carbon fibre telescope to replace my old 6” f6 GSO metal tube Newt for my City suburban location.
A few teething problems with focuser tilt and slightly misaligned spider vanes but so far extremely pleased with its performance under my Bortle 8 skies.
I had to arrange Beamtech to manufacture a 2” 15mm spacer fitting to slip over my TS GPU Coma Corrector in order to achieve focus with some spare travel.
Captured over 3 nights with heavy dew forming well before midnight
New moon period

8” f5 Klaus Helmerich Carbon fibre Newt
Skywatcher EQ6-R pro mount
ZWO2600MC cooled to -10C , Gain 101
Orion 60mm guide scope with helical focuser
ZWO120MM-S guide camera
200 x 60 sec subs ( dithered every second sub )
3 x 40 Flats
60 x Bias
EQMOD and Ascom Stellarium
APT
PHD2 Multistar guiding ( 0.45 to 0.55 arc sec total )
Stacked in DSS ( OSC multiple nights stacking )
Processed in Startools V1.8 OSC Linear Data set

Astrobin link below …..

https://www.astrobin.com/y3au6t/

Comments welcome
Thanks
Martin

Beautiful capture. Congrats on the new rig!

Congratulations to your new scope, Martin. It must be very fulfilling to build your own scope. I hope you will have a lot of fun with it. The 1000 mm focal length will bring you somewhat closer to the stars than your 6" did before

Great image - and I like this object. Unfortunately it's too low above the horizon for me. Hard to believe that this was taken under Bortle 8 skies ...

Best regards, Dietmar.

Thanks Mike and Dietmar,
Enjoying the extra light gathering power and reach of the new 8” . It’s bigger , lighter and stronger but guides beautifully
Imaging broadband under Bortle 8 is challenging but not impossible, Startools makes it all possible ( and plenty of good data too )

Clear Skies
Martin.

This is awesome! It has to be such a satisfying feeling to know even more of what you are producing is personally handcrafted, real optics, real detail, real everything.

admin wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 12:47 am This is awesome! It has to be such a satisfying feeling to know even more of what you are producing is personally handcrafted, real optics, real detail, real everything.

Thanks Ivo
Too kind
Yes it’s very rewarding to build your own scope from scratch ( especially a medium sized newtonian reflector ) , iron out most of the issues with qualification testing and finally nail an image.
I was most surprised to see a very low noise grain under my heavy LP skies with only a tad more than 3 hours of data. Nevertheless Startools did its job and the end result was more than I expected, quite a clean image
We always want more data but those 3 nights dew halted my sessions unfortunately
6 to 8 hours would have been really nice to see
Thanks again
Martin

Very nice shot indeed!

But i always wonder about newtons for AP. How do you balance them rightly with the eyepiece holder being on the side of the scope. I used to be a real newt adept but that was for visual only. I wanted only a newt at the time cause of the bigger aperture. But for AP i find refractors much more convenient.

fmeireso wrote: ↑Fri May 26, 2023 6:27 am Very nice shot indeed!

But i always wonder about newtons for AP. How do you balance them rightly with the eyepiece holder being on the side of the scope. I used to be a real newt adept but that was for visual only. I wanted only a newt at the time cause of the bigger aperture. But for AP i find refractors much more convenient.

Thank you
You balance an imaging Newt with focuser / camera pointing down the front leg of your tripod ( definitely not off to the side or up in the air )
Balancing is fairly straightforward
Refractors are excellent imaging scopes for the wider field frames but do have their limitations due to focal length and aperture when trying to go deeper ( eg galaxies )

Clear Skies
Martin

Excellent, Martin! The image is a real inspiration...I will try to do M20 or M8 this summer, no matter what. Both don't go higher than 18° for me but who cares

Congrats to the new scope, Martin. Building a scope myself and ironing out all the flaws sounds intimitading to me...hats off to you!

In terms of balancing...my focuser points straight up and the guide scope points to one side of the tube. But the 6'' is so light weighted that the EQ6-R just doesn't notice that there's an imbalance

Regards
Stefan

What I forgot to ask, Martin: Do you think it would be worthwile to add some data with a duo NB filter? Of course not for the blue part but maybe there are fainter hydrogen clouds? I'm wondering if I should try that...maybe you did that yourself before?

Regards
Stefan