Got the rig out in the front yard on Friday night to give autoguiding another try. Started off with a 30 sec unguided shot of the Triffid nebula to check its position in the frame, all was good so I did a 150 sec guided exposure and it struggled a bit but it kept the stars fairly round. From then on I couldn't get Phd2 to lock onto the guidestar for more than about 10 seconds, just kept drifting away. I tried several times and the same thing kept happening. Got pretty frustrated with it all so I pulled out all the plugs and took the Laptop back inside. The Triffid ended up being only a 3 minute exposure.
By this time I decided to swing the scope over to the Helix nebula for a few subs before the moon rose. Seeing wasn't good and there was a bit of a breeze but I managed 30 x 90 second unguided subs at 800 iso using the modded Canon 550d with the Esprit 100 mounted on the Heq5pro. How relaxing it was not having to worry about all those trip hazard cables connected to a computer! Not even Melbourne's White Night event ( the evil scourge of the astronomer
) could dampen my enthusiasm on the night.
.
