From: "Milton Aupperle" <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: September 15, 2008 12:27:51 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: M57 on a full moon

Hi Folks;

I was trying to set up PEC for my HEQ5 mount last night as turbulence

was pretty low. It's the first time I have tried this, and it didn't

work out very well (I screwed up a few times)- so I'll hopefully re-do

it again tonight.

I was using the EXHAD GrassHopper camera without any filters at all,

shooting at Prime focus (2,000 mm F/10) on the C8. So before I packed

it in for the night, I decided to do a quick unguided alignment test

on M57.

I put Astro IIDC in binned 4x4 mode, set the gains at around 30% and

then took 200 five second exposures of M57. I then selected 78 frames

for stacking and aligning to create this image.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/DSO/M57_20080914_MJA.jpg

I had high thin cloud which the full moon lit up and even with 5

second exposures the sky background was 10,000 out of 65,535. I am

very impressed with the sensitivity of this mono EXHAD camera.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle