EAA with Flat and Planets

After Thursday's session ended abruptly, I decided to give it another go tonight. Starting early was crucial—I wanted to capture M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) before it disappeared behind my house. This time, I used the Focal Reducer at 0.65x, knowing it would cause significant vignetting without a flat frame. It was a perfect opportunity to test the flat's effectiveness.

Unfortunately, M31 —and M33— were both positioned too low in the sky, hovering just above my house. The neighbor’s floodlight illuminating the house wall introduced a significant amount of stray light into the frames. During live stacking, the galaxies were barely visible, although the final stackfit image showed slight improvement.

I turned my attention to open clusters, starting with M45 (the Pleiades). While no nebulosity was visible during live stacking, the stackfit image revealed some. I also imaged M36, M37, and M38, but all showed significant distortion toward the edges of the field. It became clear that to use the Focal Reducer at 0.65x effectively, a corrector is essential. Also there was some overexposed areas on the outside, so the flat might need to be improved.

Next, I shifted focus to planets using the Celestron 2.5x Barlow lens. Alternating between Mars and Jupiter, I captured multiple images of Jupiter that showcased its rotation over time.

I couldn’t resist revisiting deep-sky objects, capturing M42 and M43 with the Barlow attached. Unfortunately, my attempt at imaging the NGC 1973 Running Man Nebula was unsuccessful. To wrap up, I tried stacking Jupiter and Mars along with their moons. Despite my efforts, both ASILive and Siril were unable to stack the images effectively.

Observations

- With 0.65x FR