NGC4762 & NGC4754

Now that spring is upon us, some fabulous galaxies are beginning to make their way into our skies at night. I've been really eager to use my newly bought Atik 16IC CCD camera and we haven't been having the best of weather lately. Last night though the sky was cloud free.

I setup my gear and opened Stellarium. As my site is restricted to pretty much the whole easterly sky I turned my attention to the bright star Arcturus, which has a lot of galaxies and globular clusters near it. Using the stars Arcturus and Muphrid as a guide I found my way slowly into the swarm of galaxies, where I immediately settled on NGC4762 & NGC4754. In fact, this is the fastest I've ever found an object I hadn't observed before, and that's without any GOTO.

OTA: WO 72mm Megrez w/ Moonlite Focuser & SkyWatcher FF & LPR Filter

Guiding: TS 9mm OAG w/ Orion starshoot

Mount: HEQ5 Pro w/ EQMOD

Camera: Atik 16IC Mono

ISO: N/A

Subs: 10x30s
Darks: N/A

Flats: N/A

Bias: N/A

Processing: Nebulosity

Post-processing: Photoshop

I realise now that I don't have near enough data so next time I'll be fetching more.

DSO 7 - Atik 16IC First Light

I had some fun with my new (second hand) Atic 16IC mono CCD camera, attached to my 8" Ritchey Chretein.

The insert in the image below was taken with the above setup. The 16IC is still an incredibly sensitive camera, despite being a few years old now. I can't recall exactly but the image was taken with an exposure lower than sixty seconds, with one dark frame applied to counteract some hot pixels. 

It's so much fun imaging at this rate. I'm going to plan an imaging Moore Marathon some time.