A cigar for bodes ?

Another clear night. I carted out the HEQ5 and followed my normal setup routine, and checked focus on Alnitak. I decided last night to have ago at M81 and M82. So before trying to find them this time, I rechecked my information. It took me a while to work out how to point the EQ mount at them, first off, I lined up, checked in my 24x80 finder and could see the grey haze, fired a test shot and yep, the Cigar was indeed there. It occured to me, that the position of the mount, with the scope moving down and the counter weight up, probably wasn't the best option, although by far the easiest to find them. So I slewed the mount around, and worked my way in to find them on the other side. I really struggled to get underneath enough and to get the scopes pointing in the right direction, but I got there in the end, but use of a camping mat and lying underneath it. Then a few tweaks for framing, a couple of test shots to check exposure times, yep up to 2 minutes at least. I decided 2 minutes and lots of subs rather than pushing too far on the sub length.

I took a few dark frames, set the timer remote for 30x2minutes and let it get on with it. When that was complete I took a few more dark frames, and set it all going again, this time aiming for 45 subs. Unfortunatly after only 29 subs the power gave up on me. I can't wait to get proper mains power in the garden. I took some more darks, then flats, and bought all the kit back in.

I popped all the frames in the stack, and set the dark multiplication factor. After reading some info yesterday about dark scaling, as long as you have bias shots, you can scale shorter darks up to the image shot duration, so taking 30s darks and multiplying by 4 in DSS. This was my first time trying this and it seems to have worked well. This of course means that 4 darks take the same time to capture as a single light frame meaning more time is spent capturing real data, cool.

Anyway, this is a first edit and needs some more work, but by the time I was done with the stack I was a bit tired to do much more.

59 x 120s @ISO800, 21 darks, 21 flats and 23 bias frames, log sqrt stretch in DSS then tweaked in PS



The arms in Bodes were much clearer in PS last night, not sure what's happened there...

I also added the Bias frames to a restack of my M3 shot from the other night... so here's the reedit



The kit is working well and I'm happy with the data collection capabilities. I need to finish off the EQmod cable, and get guiding running, then I'll be well away.