A poke in the eye

My plan for tonight, another clear night, the fifth in a row... (is this a record ?) was to have a go at a widefield image of Leo using the Nifty Fifty piggy backed on the scopes. A couple of problems with this. The angles were all wrong to fit Leo in the FOV, and the mount wouldn't balance in either axis. I may invest in a small ballhead and mount that on the piggy back screw to allow more flexibility in camera positioning.

So having decided that was a non starter, having already PA'ed, I grabbed all the wires and the lappy, hooked everything together, ran a quick 3 star align, thinking initially to have a go at the Leo Triplet and add some time to my previous image, but changed my mind, and thus my alignment stars and went for M64, the Black eyed galaxy instead.

Having read something on SGL about a method for removing horizontal banding, I had a plan. I set guiding running, set the camera for 10 minute exposures and to capture 6 of them. Then set a countdown timer to go off after an hour. The intention being that I would rotate the camera a little in the focuser, capture another hour etc. I noticed, however, that after only four subs, PHD was having a fit about low SNR, and clouds had moved in. They looked heavy enough for a spot of rain, so I grabbed some flats, and whilst clearing up, grabbed a few darks. I'm not sure I'm going to use them yet though.

This is 4x600s @ ISO800, with 3 flats.



and a crop



I have to say, that I'm not sure I'm going to bother getting more data at the moment, whilst you can tell what it is, it's too small for my frac to do justice to, there's just not enough sensor coverage for any decent amount of detail to show through. Time to find another target I think.

Of course, within 40 minutes of clearing up, the clouds had moved on and the sky was clear again. Ho hum.