Last night I was imaging M45 with my dual rig which consists of:
Tak TOA-130, Player One Zeus (IMX455), Chroma LRGBHSO
WO Cat 91, Player One Zeus (IMX455), Chroma LRGBHSO
AP Mach 2 mount
So both scopes were imaging at the same time in parallel and imaged for about 7.5 hours, including through a meridian flip.
I noticed an artifact on my TOA early in the session on the bright stars and was concerned, and then I looked at my Cat 91 and it showed an almost identical artifact. I was hoping it would wash out in stacking or decrease as time went on, but the below image (Left:Cat91 200%, Right:TOA130 100%) shows that it did not. The artifacts stayed fairly constant on both through the entire session and over the meridian flip.
So the optics are completely different, the cameras are the same, although one is a few years old, one is new. And both run chromas, but the sets were made several years apart, and the rotation didn’t change with the filter, eliminating scratches on the filter or something like that.
Temperature was fairly constant and not too cold (40s). At was very windy at times, so the TOAs final stack showed a lot of elongation and bumpiness and I didn’t use the data at all. The Cat showed it, but being lower sampling didn’t show it as much.
This is the first time seeing something like this on either scope despite imaging similarly bright stars. The TOA can show some spikes when it gets cold (normal for the TOA), but they’re all around the stars.
The full Cat91 final image is here: https://app.astrobin.com/u/Ricksastro?i=e035hd#gallery
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Rick
📷 m45.jpg
