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Alex
I was either adventurous or stupid imaging NGC 1365 last night in Bortle 8 Sydney ( The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy in Fornax at Magnitude 10.3 ) with my 6' f6 newt and using EQMOD and Stellarium found this dim little sucker in 2 mins from Home Position.
It only took 2 Sync stars 10 deg away and the scope slewed and centred it perfectly
My way of thinking, if I was slewing around with the hand controller trying to find this galaxy I probably would have waisted maybe 20 to 30mins of precious exposure time as last night was super clear and I need 4 hours ( 60 sec subs ) on the is target to process any sort of reasonable image
EQMOD and Stellarium is really accurate and simple to navigate with especially trying to find dim targets
Plate solving is too complicated for me, I try to keep things simple ( being a senior citizen )
I'm on it again tonight as its clear, maybe 3 hours worth
PS: Believe it or not I still use my hand controller to Polar Align. DSLR on live view in BYEOS ( 5 x zoom reticle ) I got the error down to 0.35 arc sec DEC and 0.50 arc sec RA with only 3 iterations ( about 10 mins )
Cheers
Martin
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