IC 5070 / Pelican Nebula

 7/3/22 -- Great day, clear night.  Moon at 17% and setting as the evening started.  No wind, mild temps, relatively low humidity.  Tonight's target: IC 5070 (the Pelican Nebula).

Started PHD2 on the Odroid XU4 with an initial drift alignment error of -200' (pre-meridian flip).  Tightened on the right side of the mount (facing the front).  First adjustment, -186'...-150'...-65'...then over-corrected... 13.5'.  Ultimately settled to -0.85'.

Ultimately, Ekos/Indi collected 108x120s lights.  Covered the OTA and pointed it at the house... then started a batch script at ~4am to collect bias and dark frames during the remainder of darkness.  In the afternoon, covered the OTA with a white tee shirt and collected flat frames at 1/1000 at ISO 100 along with dark flat frames for Astro Pixel Processor.

In examining Telescopius' telescope simulator, concluded that a 2x binning (Scale set to 0.5 in the integration tab) would likely be best.  This would produce a final field of view of 0.99 x 0.66 degree with the Canon T3I at 4.29mm per pixel and the LX10 with 0.68 focal reducer producing 1.36"/pixel.

Final result from Astro Pixelprocessor based on 3.6 hours of collection:

IC 5070 / Pelican Nebula

Astrometry result indicated an achieved pixel scale of 1.53"/pixel...a bit larger scale than anticipated... likely due to the focal length difference between the OTA and the T-mount extension.


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