Since I saw Strongmanmike's fantastic shot of The Witch Head Nebula, I have been inspired to have a go. However, the weather down here has not been favourable to attempt it thus far. Sunday nights forecast was looking ok to give it a crack. Clear skies, little wind with both seeing and transparency better than average. I love computer modeling. Let's do it!
Up to one of my 'darker' skies on the outskirts of Melbourne, armed with my SW Esprit 100 and HEQ5pro chucked in the car. Did I forget to bring anything? I don't think so. I unpacked the car on arrival at dusk. I leveled the tripod, connected the mount and was polar aligned by 10.30pm.
The trusted Canon unmodded 550d was already attached to the scope so once the weights were on I balanced the rig and was ready to shoot. Funny thing was that the scope and camera sat further back in the saddle but it was balanced and I thought no more of it.
I did a one star alignment on Sirius then slewed to Rigel to focus. All was good. Sky overhead was still clear but hang on, there's cloud to the south. It was supposed to be clear, I hope it stays over there. I quickly moved the scope to where I thought the Witch would be and set the intervalometer to 2 mins. I check my settings, Bulb, AWB and 1600 iso, all good.
The 550mm focal length using an APSC sensor is way too long to fit the whole nebula in so my intention was to shoot in two sections and stitch them together in PS. I'm ready to go! Go where? Nothing happened, I had forgot to put a battery in the camera! Ah, that explains why it wasn't balanced in the same position as usual. Doh!
Do I rebalance the scope with the battery now in the camera? No. What the? I look up and Cirrus cloud, followed by a large blanket of Alto Stratus cloud is now approaching quickly from the south. Where the hell did that come from?!
My aim was to take 20 two minute subs of each section, for a total of 40 subs. Ha! What a joke! I ended up being able to get only 10 two minute unguided subs, 4 of which I deleted due to bad tracking and cloud. Of the remaining six, I would say 2 were good. By the way, I had been using the camera earlier in the day for terrestrial photography shooting in JPG. I forgot to change it back to RAW.
It was all over by 11.15pm. I packed everything back into the car and left the site a very angry man
. It was just one of those nights.
Here is the result of 6 X 2min JPG subs at 1600iso through the Esprit 100.
I will try again!
..even full on enraging 
