From: "doobisary" <tjp314@pacbell.net>

Date: April 21, 2012 11:13:40 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: "Test" M65 & M66 image, Flea2

So, have been in Milford, Utah this week on vacation, at our dark sky property.

I brought along a Canon T1i with a Canon 55-250mm zoom lens for the imaging side of things, and my Pt Grey flea2 (1032x776 color) and Scorpion 1600x1200 monochrome cameras for guiding with a Megrez SD 80.

I mounted these on a dovetail bar and put the assembly on my Tak Em-10 mount.  I have a new Skyfi wireless adapter and SkySafari, so I left my Keyspan serial adapter at home, figuring I wouldn't need it.  My mount has a bad socket for the hand controller, so I had planned to use the "virtual" buttons in Astro IIDC and Sky Safari for centering and guiding.  Well, it turns out that I can't have the Skyfi AND the GPUSB connected to the mount at the same time, or the virtual buttons won't work.  

So then I decided to shoot with the Canon and guide manually with Astro IIDC and the flea2.  Well, the Canon lens has some distorted stars that suggests to me that the optics are poorly collimated (stars are round in one corner, and get progressively more distorted toward the other).  I tried at 250mm, and then backed off to 135mm, then turned it off and just played with the flea2 on the Megrez.

This image isn't great, but it shows even this silly single-shot color with not a particularly sensitive CCD can do.  I can't wait to try something like this while autoguiding with one of the other firewire cameras (I'll bring my keyspan adapter next time!).

Because of the 10" PE of the EM-10, and since I was getting sleepy, I took a single 1 minute dark frame, and 6 1-minute light frames.  I set the gamma to .40 and the brightness as low as it would go.  Aligned and stacked the result. (posted in files)  It's not real pretty, due to the short exposures and my desire to see faint spiral detail in M65 and 66.  I'm sure longer exposures, and more of them would allow me to record more detail with a darker sky background.  But the potential of this diminutive little camera is stunning, I think!  

...and it was a heckuva lot easier to image with than the Canon was!!

-Tim.