The Above image was taken with an Astro-Physics 305mm Honders Astrograph

SBIG STT8300 FWG-83000 was attached to AP's 3.5" focuser using a custom adapter, made by Precise Parts USA. (rig pictured below)

With its guide sensor ahead of the filter train, SBIG's FWG-8300 makes exposing and guiding "plug and play"

Unlike earlier self-guide SBIG cameras, extremely narrowband filters can be used with absolutely no guide star attenuation problems.

All camera exposure, filter selection, guide rate and calibtation is done easily within the supplied CCDops software (screen grab below)

As can be seen, average guiding errors are peaking at around 0.25 pixels (or .25 arc second )

The CCD is being cooled to -35 C with just 52% power.

-40C was within easy reach, but no darks were on file at that temperature.

Full frame downlaods take about 1 second. A second Precise Parts adapter, due to arrive soon, will allow use of SBIG's AO-8T adaptive optics.

The adaptive optics should increase image sharpness by 10-30% as well as reveal fainter structures.

36mm Baader Ha-OIII 7nm filters were used for this colour bi-colour image (340-120 minutes)

All image data was dark subtracted and flat fielded to ensure relative brightness fidelity in the resulting image

The images below, show the AP Riccardi-honders data on the left, (colour matched, but lacking SII data) with the Hubble Space telescope on the right.

Larger scale structures are show quite well in the Honders, however the Hubble data is sublime at full resolution

Below, a section of Hubble telescope data at full resolution !!

Copyright Peter J. Ward 2013