Fun with ALT-AZ on a Celestron 6SE Scope Using 420x5sec Exposures
Messier 1 Crab Nebula with Celestron 6SE ALT-AZ 420x5sec
Celestron Nexstar 6SE ALT-AZ telescopes may only take very short exposures to prevent field rotation in their images. But short exposures can be stacked together to make an effective much longer total integration time. This image was captured in a Bortle 4 zone without a wedge or EQ mount of any kind. The 6SE and its ALT-AZ mount setup in 5 minutes, was aligned to the sky in 3 minutes, and, using the ASIAIR Mini to only take the 5 second images, collected 420 of them for processing. Thus the total integration time was 35 minutes.
The camera was a ZWO ASI183MC (non-cooled) astrophotography camera. While unity gain for this camera is normally 111, I set it to 270 to boost the sensor sensitivity to help the short exposures do the work of longer exposures.
Fun with ALT-AZ on a Celestron 6SE Scope Using 420x5sec Exposures
Messier 1 Crab Nebula with Celestron 6SE ALT-AZ 420x5sec
Celestron Nexstar 6SE ALT-AZ telescopes may only take very short exposures to prevent field rotation in their images. But short exposures can be stacked together to make an effective much longer total integration time. This image was captured in a Bortle 4 zone without a wedge or EQ mount of any kind. The 6SE and its ALT-AZ mount setup in 5 minutes, was aligned to the sky in 3 minutes, and, using the ASIAIR Mini to only take the 5 second images, collected 420 of them for processing. Thus the total integration time was 35 minutes.
The camera was a ZWO ASI183MC (non-cooled) astrophotography camera. While unity gain for this camera is normally 111, I set it to 270 to boost the sensor sensitivity to help the short exposures do the work of longer exposures.