More subs M45 and M33

Twas a clear night on Friday, but we had visitors early on. Once they had left, I setup the scope on the grass, levelled and powered up. I used my usual one star align on Mirfak, and the 450d Liveview zoom mode to align. Centered and clicked the Align, and watched Mirfak drift up the screen. I thought nothing of it, although I should have twigged straight away, and used the goto to slew to M45, nicely in view over the houses. I left everything for a few minutes to settle down after the slew as normal. Came back, and tried some test shots. This is odd... I was getting trailing after only 15 seconds. I did a few more tests and yep, still happening. Then it occured to me, the view of Mirfak sailing up the screen. Damn. Powered down, and started again. Checked the level, that was fine, Made double sure of the date and time... Yep, correcty entered, aligned on Mirfak. Again it drifted up the screen. What is going on here. I pulled the power this time and considered trying a full SkyAlign. I decided to give it one more go, and this was better.

Having finally got to M45, I setup the timer remote for 99x90s and set it running. After no more than 30 subs, I had to stop the data collection and apply the hairdryer to remove the dew. I started the data collection again. After another 40 subs or so, my OH decided she wanted a bath, turned on the bathroom light and that scuppered my plans for M45 as the Sisters were sitting too near my bathroom window. Nothing like some induced LP from your own house. I set about taking darks, flats and flat darks.

Having completed that, the bathroom light gone off, I procedded to gather yet more M45 data. After about another 20 subs, I checked the images and noticed they were getting darker. I stopped once again and cleared the dew. Then checked an image in closeup. The last few all trailed. Damn. Ah well, I slewed to M33 to get some more data there. I left it for a few minutes to settle and setup for a bunch of 60 second subs. After about 40 minutes, I checked and the camera had hung and the dew had got so bad that the filters in the OTA had misted up. I gave up. So I bought everything in and waited for it all to dry out. The camera, once the battery was charged up, appears to be working fine, and has taken plenty of normal pictures since.

The data was stacked in DSS with the previous set of captured subs, and after much labourious tweaking in PS, this seemed much harder, maybe it was the double set of subs or something I don't know, I ended up with ...

M45


M33, NGC1907, IC471 and Mr Smiley


They have worked, but the amount of effort to process these seemed excessive. I don't know if a better approach would be to stack each set of frames individually and then stack the resulting stacks or something else entirely that I've not found yet.