IC2948 Running Chicken Nebula 29 May 22

[Doogs38]

I finally had another night of being home when the weather was favourable, which meant some quality time improving my gear setup (with a new Pegasus Power Box Advance gen2) and trying to get guiding working smoothly. Lessons learnt from this outing: 1) I need dew heater straps for my imaging and guide scopes as everything got wet early in the night (and messed up guiding, and my flats); 2) I need something to keep my lithium battery warmer as it doesn't like temps at or below 0 deg (but that's the same for any battery); 3) I don't fully understand 'calibrating' a guidescope setup and more reading/trialling is required; 4) get darks, flats and dark flats etc while everything is setup else getting the calibration frames the next day is a pain; 5) while not 100% necessary, I think a flattener/reducer would be good for my SW120ED. Still I had an enjoyable time capturing about 90 mins of useable data (from about 100 mins total) for IC2948 Running Chook Nebula :thumbsup:. In time, I learn how to get less pronounced stars in edited images.

My attempt at getting some M20 data was abysmal, I'll just chalk that one up as experience :lol:

[Dave882]

Wow looks like you’ve been busy tweaking the setup but hey that’s a great pic! Well done :thumbsup:

[John W]

Nice image Alex - there's always more than one way of doing something. Cheers John W.

[xelasnave]

Great image you should be very happy with such a good result.
While waiting for your dew heater straps pick up some heat patches from the chemist they will get you by until you get the real thing..they stick on easy...and when finished take them off and put them in your pocket as they will give you warmth until the following day..well worth the money.

Alex

[Drac0]

Very nice. Much better than my last attempt at it with a DSLR - that turned out something like your M20 attempt. :D

[Doogs38]

Thanks Dave, John, Alex (great name!) and Mark. I'm thoroughly enjoying learning about my equipment, image editing and not being a forum stalker for once! I found the heat patches you mentioned, Alex - thanks for the info. Regards, Alex

[AstroViking]

Great image, Alex. Especially the orange tint to the gas/dust clouds - most images I see are pretty vivid and yours is subtle and restrained.

But for the life of me, I cannot see any chicken in there....

Cheers,
V