I purchased a ZWO183mm to use with my APM 100/800, it has a perfect frame size and pixel size in terms of sampling for the lunar or solar full disk. I intend to use it for WL with my recently purchased continuum filter, and also for CaK, and maybe, if I don't get a fixed noise pattern in conjunction with the Coronado DS90, again for full disks.
Anyway it arrived on thursday, and while I was too late for any solar on my return from work there was a lovely crescent moon high in the warm spring evening sky. So I couldn't resist getting out for a try. This is at prime focus (800mm) and full aperture, nothing else apart from the diagonal in the optical train.
cresecent-moon-100-f8-183mm-bw by Mark Townley, on FlickrI'm really pleased with this, be sure to double click to view in flickr, then double click again in flickr to view full size there.
Then, I decided to try the same thing but this time with the APM 1.6x telecentric in the optical train. Again, double click for flickr and double click again (this image is even larger), but notice how at full size the image quality degrades because of over sampling.
Cresencet-Moon-100-f8-183mm-bw by Mark Townley, on FlickrI think i'm going to get a lot of fun out of this setup, but, think next purchase will be a new laptop, the above images are 128 frames from 1000, and without any ROI 100 frames is 20Gb, certainly gobbles up space on the SSD.
Hope you like!
Mark
