A calm, uneventful evening on which I used my Vixen Cassegrain again for the first time in a very long while. After doing a lot of work on my camera setups, I ended up having to use this telescope with the reducer if I wanted to use the color camera. Given that I only had this single evening, the color camera was the obvious choice anyway.
I chose Caldwell 28, an open star cluster I had never photographed before and which happened to be in a conveniently favorable position in the sky.
High resolution on Astrobin:
The annotated image:
Session details
| Telescope | Vixen VC200L |
|---|---|
| Corrector | intern |
| Effective focal length | 1800 mm |
| Camera | Canon EOS R(a) |
| Mount | Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro Hypertuned |
| Guiding equipment | William Optics Uniguide 50 |
| Guiding camera | ToupTek GPM462M |
| Date of capture | 2025-11-11 |
| Exposure (lights) | 40 × 300 s |
| Total integration | 3 h 20 min |
| Calibration frames | FLATS, BIAS |
| Sensitivity | ISO 1600 |
| Capture setup | Stellarmate OS, Raspberry Pi 5, PowerBox Adv. |
| Processing date | 2025-11-17 |
| Software stack | PixInsight, Affinity Photo |
| Location | Koblenz, Rheinland |
| Focal ratio | f/9,0 |
| Image scale | 0,61 ″/px |
| Field of view | 68,3 × 45,5 ′ |
