It looks like the promise of a few good evenings boiled down to just a few hours, I decided to capture a wide field view of NGC7000, The North America Nebula. To do this I used the William Optics Megrez 72mm Apo refractor, this should get the whole nebula in the field of view. The evening went well – setting the scope up, aligning the mount, setting up the image capture and guiding software. Focusing the telescope was another matter altogether, I had to use more spacing between the telescope and camera than I did with the Altair 8inch RC ( Ritchey Chretien ) telescope, once the correct spacing was achieved the focusing was simple aided by the use of a small Bahtinov mask. I was planning on capturing all three narrowband filter sets Ha, OIII and SII but the weather as usual turned against me so I was only able to capture enough Ha data for processing. The rest of the evening ( early morning to be honest ) was spent capturing the calibration frames and feeding the Hedgehog. Below is the final processed image, I’m really getting to love the new asi1600mm Pro camera and I’m looking forward to capturing the other two narrow band sets to finish the image off.
