Last night I was after the Seagul Nebula but could not find it because it seems it was behind some clouds
Set up the paver bricks, levelled the tripod with a spirit level, checked batteries (2) with multimeter, laid out the leads and connected everything, balanced the 80mm with the ZWO mono cooled camera, the enormous light baffle dew tube, the auto guiding camera all in place, positioned the lappy, the inverter, made sure the finder scope was pointing exactly where the scope was pointing, unfolded the table the chairand put perimeter solar garden lights so as not to worry too much about the brown snake
and up and down to do the Polemaster thing.. my legs were humming at the end of all that...
I am sure that is why I make so many silly mistakes ..its the distraction of the pain..but we don't call it that..mild discomfort
CLouds were coming and going so 30 second was a good way to go...and planes
...
I know long subs are a good idea but really I would not have got much at all last night. Strangely the mount was running perfect I managed a 4 minute unguided test run with no trailing at all ...unguided that is
the auto guiding is seemingly unnecessary.
And getting perfect focus was really difficult and things were moving around so much I did not bother to adjust focus when I switched between Ha and Luminance.
Polar was spot on and I factored in what I thought may be an atmosphere refraction element..just a guess but seemed to work...but with the moisture I figured it could be a factor...and I really did not know what I was doing but lucked a good spot is all.
So I captured some Spider Luminance and HA as it was sortta visable..
about an hour all up after I threw out the rubbish.. actually 110 made the cut....Played around with extremely high gain settings and low ones and managed to capture just the core thru to having the core absolutely blown out but picking up other stuff.
Stacked 250 all up of 30 second subs (no darks) using about 150 subs I captured a month or so ago. Such a big stack had the lappy running for about 6 hours
it was finishing just as I woke up this morning…needed a huge crop cause I did not think to match last night with the earlier batch from a month or more ago
....
Took the one and only stacked result photo processed it in Startools copied it 5 times but with different intensities,,,,,from just a bearly detectable core to one blown out...took these five to photo shop and using the "Rubber" tool slowly merged this and that to place the good core in the one holding the blown out core and worked them up for a reasonably even photo..kept the final and turned the others into solid colour blanks that I used to colour the image...so the colour is absolutely artificial and there may be some blue red giants if you look closely
...I was playing so I am not too worried
… but that's all I have been doing today
I was so occupied setting up and cloud dogging that I did not have time to set up the BWM and camera...which was the idea...maybe tonight...
alex
