M27 - Dumbbell Nebula

First light with the new telescope! I’m over the moon with how this image turned out with such little exposure time, though it is a fairly bright target… I actually reduced my subframe length to 2 minutes instead of my usual 3 minutes because the core of the nebula seemed a bit blown out. Working with a new type of telescope (newtonian), which is significantly heavier and about 4x longer in focal length meant lots of new bits for my routine. There’s still lots to learn, but I was happy that I was able to get a nice image on the first night. I tossed quite a few frames due to needing to fine tune my guiding, since I’m now guiding at 240mm instead of 120. Once I got it dialed in, it was hovering around .6”-.7” RMA for the night, which was great. I was impressed that the telescope arrived in near perfect collimation after being shipped overseas, so I’m hoping that the scope will continue to hold collimation well, as I move the scope and mount in and out every night. The OTA is aluminum and cools down very quickly to ambient temp, which is great. All-in-all very happy with the result from first light, but still some more tinkering to do to dial things in. I’ll have another image coming soon as well, as I tested it on two targets that night to see how well collimation and tracking and such will hold in a nightly session where it switches targets. It performed excellently!