Hang up your coat, are you getting engaged ?

Sunday was clear once again... This is almost turning into a habit. That's the good news, the bad news is I had a load of stuff to do inside. But... All is not lost. About 2100 I setup the scope, leveled, powered, one star aligned. Popped on the camera, used Altair to focus. I set basic focus through the viewfinder, then switched on liveview, zoomed in, adjusted the mount to centre Altair, zooming in again, and moved the focus in and out around the in focus point until I had it as good as I was going to get. Then shot a couple of 30 second test frames to check at full zoom on preview. All looked good so I slewed to the Coathanger asterism, AKA Brochhi's Cluster or Collinder 399. I set the timer remote for 60 x 60 seconds and let it do it's stuff, whilst I went indoors and did what needed doing.

After checking I had 20 with tracking errors, the rest stacked with 3 darks and processed in PS to produce



I then used the goto to slew to M29. I saw this first on Saturday night, and figured it was worth a try. Again I set the timer remote for 60x60 seconds and left it to it. I wasn't quite sure in my 60 second test shot where M29 was, so I didn't adjust position. Anyway, stacking and processing the 61 frames (I got away with that one, no errors...) with 3 darks, the result is



M29 is the small butterfly shaped pattern at the centre bottom of the frame.

I had time for one more, manually slewed the scope to Polaris and setup for the engagement ring. Something didn't seem right, as I couldn't hear the mount motors tracking at all. Then it occured to me, I was being dumb... Of course the motors wouldn't do anything, Polaris doesn't move... DOH!!!. I figured I'd better go for shorter subs on this one to avoid trailing, and it looks like I got away with it. I set the timer remote for 20 x 30 seconds, stacked the frames with 3 darks and processing in PS left me with



It was getting a little misty and this can be seen in the glow around Polaris

Once this set had finished, I cleared up, packed away and downloaded the data. Good job too as within 20 minutes the sky had disappeard behind a pile of grey again.

I also had a reprocess of both the M27 and M45 images. The cause of the oddness with 1/3 from the left moving to the right in stacking turned out to be caused by the single 30 second frame confusing DSS. Removing this, restack and reprocess left me with



After some discussions and 4 attempts on M45, 3 of them discarded, I finally managed to process them, keeping the Neb smooth, that was tough....



I'm looking forward to getting back to M45 and grabbing a load more subs and seeing if I can't get more Neb in the resulting image.