New Mount: 10Micron GM1000 - Initial Setup

I finally bought the bullet and bought a new mount: a GM1000 from 10Micron! The main reason were the absolute encoders (yei! No more PEC!!!) and that it has a built-in model building and correction algorithm.

The whole package came on a gigantic pallette:

... but it was a lot of stuff:

the mount itself	the counterweights	cables and instructions
cover and power supplies (110V and 12V)	Aries Tripod	Transport Boxes

Assembly was fairly straight forward: mount on tripod, counterweight shaft, counterweights, scope:

Slewed a little around and everything seems to work. Yei

First Light with Patricia

At the Oregon Star Party, Renate was so excited about the dark skies and what you can see that she saved all her money (and even had a cookie sale) for a 10" Dobsonian Telescope. 

Two weeks ago, it arrived and Renate called it "Patricia".

And last night it was just clear enough to catch first light: the Moon, the Pleiades and classifying several stars by color. She was so excited (and, yes, me too!)

Merging multiple images

By accident I shot various images of SH2-112 and SH2-115:

Both nebulae:	SH2-112 only	SH2-115 only

I was wondering about ways to combine these:

1. Treating them as a mosaic, i.e. preprocess separately and then combine (using Average - not Overlay in GradientMergeMosaic!!!)
2. Preprocessing them combined

The first one was fairly straight-forward. I preprocessed them as I always do and then used the GradientMergeMosaic process in Pixinsight.

For the second one, I did the following:

1. weighted them together
2. calibrated them separately
3. registered them to one of the images that has both nebulae
4. stacked them together

Here is the outcome of both processes:

Mosaic	Preprocessed combined

Well, that's pretty clear ...

But I still wanted to find out if the stacking of all images improved the quality of the image. So, I cut out SH2-115 from both images and compared those:

SH2-15 in mosaic	SH2-115 in combined image

Interestingly enough, the mosaic image seems to have a slightly higher SNR. So, I'll go with that method.