[rcheshire (Rowland)]

Long time since posting - this is not a particularly good image of M8 and M20 and a crop of the whole.

80mins of useful data out of 4 hours+ of imaging from a small country town in Victoria - the sky was spectacular between large pools of cloud.

Equipment as below... the cooling failed (now fixed) but the fan and heat sink kept the cold finger at 2 - 3C - roughly ambient. Not bad.

To keep stars small and separated, I have been experimenting with low ISOs. 4 minutes at iso400 seems OK with better results at iso200 - longer exposures a few hours of data and very good guiding required. I'll keep working at this, plus a few other ideas I have in mind.

The image is under sampled - pixel size vs FL is not ideal. The camera is also tilted. Eggy stars left side. Need to fix this. The focus tube needs support when using a flattener. I forget this on the odd occasion it gets some use.

So just about everything imaginable. Dithering and careful calibration probably rescued it and made it more of a learning event.

There you go Alex... very much in keeping with your philosophy of posting our best and our worse.