Playing amongst the stars

Saturday night... The sky was clear (Again, that's unusual...) So at about 2100 I got the gear out. I did my usual level and power up, but this time used the one star align on Mirfak. I'd had good tracking results after doing this on Friday, even though the focus was out and I really couldn't be faffed with messing about with SkyAlign again. When it works it's great, when it doesn't it's just painful.

I then swapped the 5mm ortho and diagonal for the Camera. I used Mirfak to set focus, firstly through the viewfinder to get it about right, then on the LCD with liveview, as it's nice and bright, it shows up well on liveview. I used the liveview magnification ability to zoom in 10x on the Mirfak and gently and slowly moved the focus in and out, just passing over spot on, reducing the step each time, untill Mirfak was as small as I could make it on screen. I then fired a test 30 second exposure and zoomed all the way in. Looks pretty good.

I then used the goto and slewed around to M27. The Goto wasn't spot on, but M27 was in the FOV and a minor tweak with the mount motor bought it central. I set the timer remote for 15 x 60 seconds and set it off. Then grabbed the planentarium, and went Constellation spotting.

After a few minutes I was able to easily make out Cygnus, Lyra, Vulpecula, Sagita, Delphinus, Aquila and Pegasus. By my reckoning that gives me another 5 spotted and identified taking my total up to 43, just about half way there.

I left the scope and camera going for a little while, had myself a cup of tea. Then went back with the 10x50 bins for a good nose around. I set the timer for 15x120 seconds and set that off. Whilst the camera was firing away, I looked at the Coathanger, found M29 and M39 and kinda got lost in the sheer quantity of stars in the Cygnus region. Once the 30 minutes had finised on M27 I tried to go for even longer. However, this wasn't to be. At 3.5 minutes, every single star suffered badly from errors. I think 2 minutes is the limit of my mounts capbilitues. I did consider trying M29 and M39, but the position put them so that the camera would smack the tripod leg, so didn't try those.

I was looking at various maps, trying to find anothter target, when I glanced around and one of my favourites was rising above the house. M45 - The Pleiades was back. I just couldn't refuse that one... I slewed the scope, made a couple of minor adjustments to framing and set the camera going for 16x120s shots. I had a look around in the bins at this part of the sky. M45 being the starting point, as beautiful as I remember. Then onto M31, Cassie area, The double, The Owl and Kembles cascade. The imaging run finished, and as everything, including me, was beginning to get very cold and damp, the timer remote was literally dripping, as was the dew shield and on camera flash (most odd as the rest of the camera was clear, oh well). I packed up, went in, and got to work processing the images.

A couple of things went wrong in the stacking process, so the framing is not what I wanted. For some reason, the left third of the frame of M27 was moved to the right hand side... Most odd. I'll restack and see if that helps.



And M45 had weird oddness around the periphery, I had to crop it away. And I overdid something in processing too...



Both of these will be re-edited. Probably a lot of times.... I enjoyed that.