On Saturday, July 22 I finally got a decent evening with clear sky to get out with the Ultima 8 converted Hyperstar V4. The bar was set deliberately low for this evening as I was also testing the new ZWO EAF (electronic auto focuser) and its ability to target better focus. Anytime you are testing systems, it is best to do them one at a time.
Having said that, after I found my focus point fairly well, I went through the ASIAir polar alignment routine and did a good enough polar alignment, and then slewed to M13. The scope took two itterations to center the object, and after training my guiding, I set up an autorun sequence of 10 lights at 60 seconds. The result, after stacking with Astro Pixel Processor using darks that I had created the week prior is shown above. This is a cropped image and in the original there is considerable vignetting because I did not shoot any flats or bias frames for this test.
For my second image shown above (M51), I did a similar routine but I did an autofocus on it prior to shooting the 10 x 60 second lights, again no flats and no bias frames.
I am going to consult with Starizona before I attempt any kind of collimation on this unit. It looks like my guiding could be off a bit on the images ande also I did do considerable cropping to improve the image scale of the original. Again this comes down to process and details and writing down a workflow that allows for best practices and quality results. For this event above, I was using a new version of the ASIAir software that will take some adjusting to, as well as testing two new pieces of hardware in the EAF and the Hyperstar lens. Overall i am not displeased.
The SN6 may be gone but my new best friend, the Hyperstar 8 V4 is a pretty good replacement for it all.
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