CDK12 First Light - 90 Minutes of Messier 40 from a Bortle 8 with a Near Full Moon (Timothy Martin)

CDK12 First Light - 90 Minutes of Messier 40 from a Bortle 8 with a Near Full Moon

This is really a terrible image. I had to do things to the background that are illegal in 22 states. Shooting a broadband target from a Bortle 8 with a near full moon is not optimal for any scope, but especially not for this one. But I only had one night to field test this beast. Clouds are back now and will be for a while. And I needed a target that was available all night because I had no idea when, or even if, I would be able to actually start shooting. By the time I got all the first-time-use issues worked out, it was 4:30am. So I was only able to get 27 minutes each of R, G, and B. Still, in my book, it was a fabulous success. Getting it properly focused, focusing the guide cam, getting it polar aligned, building a model (25 points this time--I usually do 100 and pare it down to 70 or so), calibrating guiding were a real challenge. Add to that, last night I had an exhibition to attend, so I didn't even get started until 11:30pm. The goal here was to get all that working and get at least some data with round stars and maybe a little detail. I think this works.

Edited to add: I'm very pleased to find out that the CDK12 fills up the Moravian C5 quite nicely. The stated image circle on the CDK12 is 52mm, but the C5 has a diagonal of 55mm. I thought performance would really suffer in the corners and I'd have to do a lot of cropping--which is a waste of time and money. But the stars came out fine all the way to the edge. I only cropped about 50 pixels around each edge here. This is not a thorough test with a target that really fills the frame with light. But based on what I'm seeing with the stars in the corners, I'm pretty happy with this right now.

As an aside, I will probably wind up binning this camera 2x2 or downsampling most of the time unless seeing happens to be spectacular. An image scale of 0.307 is pretty thoroughly oversampled. 0.614 would probably produce much better results. And the C5 has hardware binning after a fashion. So it'll be worth a try.

Final
Original
B

B

Title: CDK in a Bortle 8

Description: Damn, this scope is a pain to move around. I thought the C11 with a GM1000 was bad. That's easy compared to this. I hope it's worth it!

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	SAC3VPDWNQFV3XOD27WBPXX9WP9LQB7P
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h21m17s.596
RA (top/left)	12h25m02s.849
RA (top/right)	12h17m32s.715
RA (bottom/right)	12h17m36s.704
RA (bottom/left)	12h24m57s.715

Dec (center)	+58°03′53″.88
Dec (top/left)	+58°25′34″.81
Dec (top/right)	+58°25′41″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	+57°41′48″.91
Dec (bottom/left)	+57°41′41″.26

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