Running man past the birdie

Or, capture M42, M43 and the running man...

Orion was just clearing the roofline when the clouds parted and cleared off. Even though it was quite late, I decided I needed to know if my corrective actions had worked and whether I was going to hit all sorts of tracking errors again or not. I setup, levelled, aligned on Betelguese. Waited a couple of minutes and took a 90 second shot. Spot on. No noticeable trailing, no tracking errors from the mount. Phew... I used the goto to slew to M42 and left it for 10 minutes to allow M42 to clear the roof line. I figured that rather than waste the time, I'd shoot my flats and flat darks so did that as usual.

Using the time remote, I captured a sequence of frames varying from 2 seconds for the trap to 45 seconds. Total time 875 seconds or 14.5 minutes. Captured with darks (only 10 of each, should really have gone for 15) and a total number of useable frames of 47. Only lost 3 to trailing and one to tracking errors. Orion is sadly too far south for longer exposures by the time it's cleared the roofline, and trailing becomes a significant issue.

Anyway, I threw the whole lot of frames into the DSS mixer, set to blend and left it to it. Then used PS to stretch and tweak resulted in



Ok, I've blown the trap, I wasn't sure how that was going to come out, but I will stack the short subs to pull out that detail and try and merge them together in PS. It's also a little noisy, I think for ISO1600 I really need more dark subs. However, I'm really pleased with this result, but will revisit to see how much further refinement I can achieve.