New Imaging Chain, June 12, 2020

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I rearranged the imaging chain on the 5i. Basically I took out the Atmospheric Distortion Corrector. So now it is 1250 FL telescope, 0.63 Focal Reducer, 3x Barlow and ASI120mc-s Camera. According to calculations the focal length should be:

To test this we need to measure something very accurately. For this we can use, Jupiter, Mars, or Saturn.

From this we have Mars:0.2383, Jupiter:0.2381, and Saturn:0.2345. For an average of 0.237 ” per pixel or a computed focal length of 3264 mm. Still quite a bit more than predicted and illustrates that these focal lengths and powers of consumer optics are strong functions of how you use them. Notice that the only thing that changed from last week was the removal of the ADC. In that arrangement the measured iFOV and focal length was 0.173 ” per pixel and 4471 mm.

In any case, I imaged a star to get the resolution etc… Here is the image:

Single star image. Measured FWHM is 7.812 pixels or 1.85 arc seconds. The theoretical FWHM is 4.14 pixels or 0.98 arcseconds.

Here are several experiments:

Take about 2 hours data and combineit into one giant file:

run it through WinJuPos to derotate and get an aawesome pic:

Not so great.

Then use the same long file and just do Autostakert and Registax:

A little better, but not that great.

Finally, the best result was from just using 1 alignment point and integrating the whole thing.

This is from a long sequence of 44000 frames

It’s hard to say if any one was better than the others.

Also, Uranus:

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