According to the previous day's weather forecast it was going to be raining all day; on the day it dried mid afternoon and left a lovely clear sky with only a little cloud.
I decided target for the night was going to be M27, mainly because I had had a go at imaging it previously in the summer and hopefully would be able to see some improvement, now that I have a routine for setting up the GEM to track accurately.
I have also made a mount for the Skywatcher ST80 to piggyback the Newtonian. When I get a guiding CCD, I was going to get a SW 80ED but the newt is pretty good and I know a few of its idiosyncrasies now. Following advice from Stargazers, I have considered getting a 9 x 50 finderscope, but thought I would see if the mount could handle the weight of the newt plus DSLR plus ST80. So, with DSLR mounted over the counterbalance bar and ST80 on the opposite side, I was hoping for an interesting night!
I took around 120 x 45 second exposures; once cloud problem, squiggles, meteors and planes had been removed , I had 90; DSS left me with 27! Anyway, pretty pleased with this compared with my earlier go:
Next time, I will take some darks and bias and see what they do for me.
I decided target for the night was going to be M27, mainly because I had had a go at imaging it previously in the summer and hopefully would be able to see some improvement, now that I have a routine for setting up the GEM to track accurately.
I have also made a mount for the Skywatcher ST80 to piggyback the Newtonian. When I get a guiding CCD, I was going to get a SW 80ED but the newt is pretty good and I know a few of its idiosyncrasies now. Following advice from Stargazers, I have considered getting a 9 x 50 finderscope, but thought I would see if the mount could handle the weight of the newt plus DSLR plus ST80. So, with DSLR mounted over the counterbalance bar and ST80 on the opposite side, I was hoping for an interesting night!
I took around 120 x 45 second exposures; once cloud problem, squiggles, meteors and planes had been removed , I had 90; DSS left me with 27! Anyway, pretty pleased with this compared with my earlier go:
Next time, I will take some darks and bias and see what they do for me.
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