Hey guys


I've been superbusy sorting out the problems with my buckled Skywatcher 190MN trying to straighten out crooked stars in various parts of the image, & finally pinpointed the source of the errors, the tube is slightly dented around the focuser assembly, resulting in ccd-tilt, no matter how I tried to collimate the problem away. Oh well, way too many nights spent troubleshooting this, I made a final collimation & left it there. Time to collect some data! This early winter have been horrible, giving me just a few hours each month, mostly when its full moon of course.

Now for the good stuff, my remote roll-off-roof observatory is now operating fully automated since almost 2 months, using ACP + Scheduler together with the AAG Cloudwatcher cloud sensor. I'm streamlining my scripts & settings now & then, making the whole "factory" work even better with fewer & fewer issues.

So here's one of my first images using data acquired during nights when I was deep asleep, and also when the weather was clearing up after midnight (in other words, data I'd never have gotten without the Scheduler). With my job, it's a big no-no to show up without a good nights sleep, so this lets me squeeze out way more data than I've been able to get before.
The target was NGC 206, an open cluster inside M 31, the Andromeda galaxy. I've seen a few ppl separate the stars and also capture the different colors of the stars using huge rc's costing x20 times more than my humble 190MN , so I didn't have my expectations too high, but I was very curious to see how deep inside M 31 I could dig (also fun returning to one of the first DSO's I ever shot)

The data comes from 4 different nights, using 3 different collimation-settings, so the star-shapes may not be optimal. But since it was a test to see how the rig operates automated, I'm very happy with the results. There's soo much to see in there


The Gear:
Skywatcher 190MN w. motorized focuser
QSI 583 wsg-8
10 Micron GM2000 HPS

The Data:
L: 43 * 5 min
RGB: 8 * 5 min / channel
Ha: 9 * 10 min
All subs unguided

The Result:
Click image for full version



I've also included an annotated version, which points out some areas of interest. Click image for full version




Enjoy!

Best Regards
Jonas Grinde
http://grinde.zenfolio.com