Hey all!

I assume we all at astrobin have something in common. We are always aiming for the point that our images are as good as they can be so gathering good data, as good as it can be with the circumstances we live in, process the data to the extent possible with our own skills, or ask for help, do some final tweaking, upload and hope others like the image at least as much as we do for our own or give some feedback on how to improve for the next revision. In addition we like to share what we do and share our experience to help others as a community.

I love astrophotography and this community but it isn't always true that we reach that goal of that picture that snaps!

Therefore I hereby introduce my image of "The FAIL nebula"

Not long ago I went for a new telescope, an f/4 Newtonian and I heard horror stories of f/4 and collimation. Yes, they are more tedious to collimate, which I also heard from some talented guys here, but it is doable if you take your patience. However, already with the first pictures, I realized that my old MPCC coma corrector didn't provide me round stars to all corners. As the error was the same on all edges I was thinking that I don't have any tilting going on and found out that I forgot to install one of the distance rings back to the corrector that I needed to remove for my old camera. It definitely got better but the error wasn't totally gone. So I decided to add some additional space and get from 55mm to 56mm. As everything else was running pretty fluent and easy a couple of nights I wanted to use the clear sky yesterday to test the new trail with 56mm. As always, when I reassemble my gear in the garden, I focus, PA and make some test pictures. As expected, on the short 10-30 second exposures on the mobile display I use to connect to my ASI AIR Pro everything seemed fine, round stars in the corners ...yay

I set up my autorun which I started immediately and being already a bit tired I followed only the first two 180s exposures and thought everything is ok. Then some clouds moved in and I needed to interrupt for an hour. After restarting the autorun IC1340 was nice and clean as this is one of the goto objects for the L-extreme ... what could go wrong. However, I had that small feeling somewhere in my brain, that I am not 100% on focus, but instead of interrupting and checking, I fell asleep. 

In the morning after meridian flip and auto home, I took my flats as always. Hoping for some pretty good data I processed everything in PI and ... nope ... out of focus just like as if I had known it from the start

I can imagine we all have a lot of similar stories and data that gave us the experience to evolve for future endeavors.

This time I decided to spend some moments to at least do some small tweaking and release it here, just as a reminder for myself and as an example for everyone who struggles to improve or for everyone who had a similar experience in the past.  

Good light to all of you.