At the end of year 2012 I have sold my Losmandy G-11 mount because I knew that one day I will have to adopt a Newtonian system as my primary astrograph (and I did not want to overweight the perfectly working G-11 and I did not want to keep two „big“ mounts as I am using only one at a time). Therefore I changed my primary mount for a Gemini G53F with Pulsar2 controller (with built-in GPS system) that can handle lot of weight with ease (and precision). But what next? After selling all telescopes that I have used rarely (weather permitting problem) I decided for a top solution with quality in mind.
January 2013 ordered, March 2013 delivered, May 2013 first light tested. Vignetting issue resolved, spider vanes (secondary holder) issue resolved during summer 2013. Last issue remaining (subtle primary mirror related thing) is currently „under investigation“. In this short article I would like to show the H-alpha first light. In April 2013 I made the same image using my small Borg77EDII with a superb Atik460EXM ccd camera doing 24x6min (144min total) so in May 2013 I decided to shoot the same thing doing the same, 24x6min subs with the new astrograph. In spite of the fact that KAI-11000 CCD is 10 times worse than ICX694 for narrow band imaging (5x worse in noise terms, 2x worse QE of the CCD in Ha), the big aperture of 250mm vs. 77mm and the big surface of the detector (36x24mm vs. 12.5x10mm) brought its fruit.
The North America Nebula (NGC7000)
ASA 10″ NWT + MII G3-11000
Borg 77EDII + Atik 460EXM
On the other hand, you can see the confirmation of „known“ fact that you can do a miracle-like images even with a small refractor, but you need it to be a fast one and you definitively need a superb (ultra clean) CCD camera. But for LRGB imaging the Newtonian system does not have any competition (that’s why I keep two imaging systems and two main CCD cameras).
All my published images taken with my new ASA 10″ can be found on following
URL link.