M57 with Orion Europa

17:30 9/10/2004 UTC

Recently I purchased a new OTA, Orion Europa 200f6 Newton with Hilux coatings. Yesterday weather was excellent and I decided to image M57 to see how it performs in afocal photography. I shot as long as my batteries lasted in zero degree temperature. Result was some 55 images from which 10 was discarded because of vibrations or tracking problems. I also spent some time with post processing. All post processing except scaling and JPEG conversion was done in IRIS. Features I used from IRIS was automatic artificial flat field, sigma-clipping combine and maximum entropy deconvolution. All channels were processed separately and before combining they were morphed to fit together to reduce coma. Despite of irritating JPEG artifacts, I am pretty happy about the result. However it's a point and shoot camera!

Camera: Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera | Telescope: Orion Optics Europa 200mm f6 Newtonian reflector | Mount: Orion Skyview Pro | Exposure: 45 x 15s f3.2 ISO400 | Software: IRIS, GIMP