After a week stretch of clear and moonless nights of imaging at F7, I put the Hyperstar back on the Celestron 9.25” EdgeHD, to do some fast imaging at F2.2. Man, I love my Hyperstar. The Hyperstar is a lens, made by Starizona, which replaces the secondary mirror on my Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope (SCT). The deep space camera then attaches to the front end of the scope, instead of the back.
Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251 appears in the constellation Cepheus. This dark nebula is approximately 1,000 light years away and consists of dark dust and gasses in the molecular cloud. It is very tricky to frame dark nebulas, because in the single frame the nebula is very faint and barely visible. A lot of integration and image stretching brings out the nebula during processing.
On the night of May 23rd into May 24th, I trained my scope on LDN1251. After framing it with reference stars, I locked my guiding on a guide star and unleashed 120 x 3 minute exposures. LDN1251 was positioned very nice and high in the sky for me. I calibrated and stacked the best 100 lights in Astro Pixel Processor. I used PixInSight for the final processing.
Equipment:
Celestron 9.25” EdgeHD
Starizona Hyperstar V4
Celestron CGEM DX mount
ZWO ASI2600mc-pro Imaging Camera
ZWO ASI224mc Guide Camera
SVBONY 60mm Guidescope
ZWO ASIair Pro for image acquisition and gear control.