Another M27

[twilbur]

After seeing Brian's I decided to go after M27 myself. Last night it was very hot, humid and hazy, but the air was steady. I decided to go unbinned. My computer is old and slow, it took forever to process these big unbinned images!



Some signs of lateral star movement signifying my continued tracking issues. I'm going to retrain PEC to see if I can smooth it out a bit. I'm also toying with the idea of opening the scope up and checking out the worm and RA wheel.

Better than what I was doing 2 years ago, yikes!

[Jake]

Ted -

Tracking issues aside (and it isn't very bad), that is an excellent shot.  Your processing and color looks very natural, and you have gotten alot of detail.  It sure is amazing to see the progress you have made in two years when comparing to your old M27.  I should go dig up mine from two years ago, but I am scared to look!  

Is the tracking issue from the autoguider and the filters, or is it from the leap in the PE you were speaking about?

-Jake

[Ron]

Ted,

Nice image.

Like Jake said, there's quit a change from your last try.

Rick mentioned a trick to fudge a little on elongated stars, does anybody remember what it was??

Ron

[sc02492]

Beautiful image Ted!  Nice detail and color.  My advice is to NOT mess with the RA/DEC worms for this scope, since I'm not convinced that there's much adjustment that could be made to significantly improve the PE in the LX200.  It's true that dirty grease can sometimes be responsible for the jumps in PE that you might be observing, but I'm not sure how easy this would be to clean effectively, and the gains would be small.  I like the idea of retraining the PEC.  The other thing to make sure about is to keep your system weighted towards the east at all times- this minimizes play in the worm and permits more accurate tracking.

Nice shot.

Steve

[Grizz]

Hey Ted thats really nice. Pec (for me anyway) seems to be quite tricky. I did a PEC training session and my PEC seems worse than it was before. I disabled it and its better. I think my initial training was herky jerky! (aside from mechanical consideration) IMHO all PEC training needs to be done quickly and smoothly, I need to train myself to be able to do an accurate PEC training session and a few updates. Trial and error.

Anyway... beautiful image despite the minor star problems.

[twilbur]

Thanks everyone!

Maybe you're right Steve. I did the Weasner style move the scope back and forth in RA a bunch of times with the gears engaged to loosen things up, but it had no effect.  

The odd thing is that I measured my corrected periodic error about a year ago and it was around 6 arcseconds peak to valley.  Something has changed or my PEC training has gone stale somehow. We'll see how a retrain does.