Enter a new telescope: the legendary AT8RC. The AT8RC is an 8″ aperture Ritchey–Chrétien style reflector telescope. It’s a carbon fibre tube, 8″ in diameter with two parabolic mirrors that fold the incoming light from the big opening on one side down through a smaller opening on the other side. Hey presto, a telescope that’s brilliant for narrow-field, high-magnification work like galaxies or particularly detailed nebulae. This is the first image I produced using this telescope in combination with the QSI683 camera. It is the NGC7000 nebula, or rather, a small and quite detailed portion thereof.
My notes on this one are a little scarce, but I believe it was created using 37 x 20-minute exposures alternating between the Hydrogen-Alpha (red) and Oxygen-III (blue) narrowband filters.
