Not Quite NGC7789 and some more moons

The moon was quite low, bright and majestic in the early evening sky yesterday. I had a play and took a set of pictures using different things..

The Moon


Aerial Moon


Sliding Moon


And I had a go at this in HDR also, but I don't think this looks as good.


I Spy Moon


Then as the evening wore on, remaining clear, unlike Saturday, I setup the scope. Another evening where I had loads of stuff to get done, but the timer trigger saved the day. I followed my normal procedure, plonked the tripod down, this time on the grass (I got fed up with everytime I moved, the motion of the decking bounced the scope), levelled and aligned on Mirfak. I used the 10x liveview to align and focus. I then used the goto to slew to NGC7789, as it was quite high, I kept a close eye on the camera as it got near to one of the tripod legs. I then left everything to settle down for 5 minutes before I started the timer capturing 30 second exposures. I checked it after a while, and stopped the timer as the objective was beginning to mist up, so I grabbed the OH's hair dryer and played it around the lens, this cleared the mist. I then thought I'd have a go at 60 second subs and tried a couple. There were not evident signs of trailing, but before I adjusted the timer, I grabbed 10 x 30 second darks. I reset the timer and let it get on with the 60 second subs.

When, finally, the camera stopped capturing, I grabbed another 10 darks for the 60 second subs. I used notepad on the lappy to grab some flats, and some flat darks, and cleared up.

Reviewing the frames after downloading, I realised that the last half of my 60 second subs were all affected with field rotation, so I binned those. 3 of the remaining half had tracking errors, and I binned them too. So I ended up with 62x30s and 17x60s. Processing and stacking in DSS took nearly 2 hours, then a tweak in PS resulted in



And I missed. NGC7789, is just off the bottom of this image. If I'd turned the camera orienation round from lanscape to portrait I would probably have caught it. This is always going to be a problem with objects that you can't actually see. I'd worked out I was in the right ballpark as I'd looked online and found some images, and there are 4 brighter stars in the area, unfortunatly the four I'd found were the wrong four, although the positions look very similar. Ah well. I'll return and try this one again one night, it doesn't look like it's going to be tonight through, it's cloudy.