Phew It works

Another clear night. Another opportunity to check things out and see if I've still got the problem. During the day I'd found a couple of things wrong. Firstly, the head mount bolt was a little looser than necessary which mean the HEQ5 head wasn't tightly connected to the tripod head. Not a good thing, but not enough for it to fall off. I also found that one of the piggyback mounting nuts was loose, the addition of a spring washer and tightening it down solved that. So, all looking good fingers crossed.

I carted all the gear out, levelled using the Ambubble, set the PA setting circles, powered up and polar aligned. I also rigged up part of my camera safety fittings just in case. I need to work out a way of setting this up better, but I'm sure this would have worked if needed. I swung the mount using the clutches to point at Orions belt, and used the slew controls to centre Alnitak, then used this to focus, then balanced the mount. I decided then, that I'd go for a target I can find easily, so headed off to find The Beehive in Cancer. I used the 24x80 (Konus + 17mm Hyperion) finder and had a good look at the beehive, centred it in the camera viewfinder, removed the Hyperion, and took a test shot. 60 seconds was good, no trailing. 90 seconds also no trailing. Phew. I figured 90 seconds at ISO800 would do nicely, set the timer remote and let it do it's stuff. I had to gently apply the hair dryer a couple of times, but as dew was only just beginning to form on the lens, I was able to clear it in under the 10 seconds of the interval my timer remote is set for.

Whilst I was setting this up, at about 20:27, I saw something shoot across the sky, west to east at about Zenith. Far to fast for a Satellite.

I got out the 15x70's and had a little nose around. M44, had a look for M67, and I think I found it. M42. Then swung around, and following the instructions in TL@O I had a look for M3. I found it easily.

Once I'd captured my M44 data, changed camera battery and completed darks and flats. I swapped SD Card and unmounted the Frac combo, and mounted the Skymax 102 instead. It had been suggested on AC, that the little Mak would be very good with the 450d on a Globular cluster, and given where M3 was sitting, figured it was worth a go.

So I fitted the camera with the CLS filter, I'm not sure this was truly necessary with this setup, and will probably try this again without it. Focused using Saturn, grabbed a test shot, and was quite surprised at the result, considering this is a mammoth crop of a single frame



I set the timer remote for 60 second exposures @ISo1600 and went into to process the M44 data.

Whist the stack was running, I hadn't realised, but the power pack had run nearly flat, so the mount had stopped tracking. Oh Goody. This meant I only got 14 useable subs of M3. It looks like I'm limited to only 4 hours with the Maplin power tank. Maybe this is a dodgy battery, or a damaged battery, I don't know. So I grabbed the darks and flats, and cleared up.

After stacking the M44 data, I stretched the histogram with LogSqrt in DSS and tweaked a little in PS



The M3 data was also processed, but there were not enough lights. I also had some oddities when I used 7 flats with Vignetting going in the other direction, and a green colour cast, not had this before with the CLS after stacking.



I had a restack and used only 3 flats instead and that seems to have helped. I've also been able to remove the colour cast with tweaking.



The M3 data really needs more work in processing, but these are just a couple of quick rough edits, so I'll spend more time on it later. I'm glad everything is now working as I expected, and I've found what I hope is the cause.