Well I did get my barndoor mount fixed yesterday and I was ready to have another go at M31. I spent 30 minutes setting everything up outside and aligning the mount and wouldn't you know it, out of nowhere a large band of cloud crept across the sky
.
Anyway, I quickly abandoned M31 and swung the camera round to the tail of Scorpius which was getting quite low on the horizon by that time. I stumbled across M7 and started shooting 15 second exposures. I didn't have time to test any longer exposures as the cloud was moving across that way. I packed away when M7 succumbed to the clouds and just to annoy me, by the time I had packed up the cloud band had almost passed and I could see clear skies on the horizon again. I took it as a sign that I should have an early night instead.
So here is 23 x 15 seconds of the M7 open cluster in Scorpius. 70 mm FL. Stacked and gradient removed in Iris. Levels adjusted in Photoshop.
There are a handful of hot pixel streaks that the dark frames didn't remove for some reason, and there is a black region in the top left. I don't know if that is a feature of the sky or dust on the CCD perhaps.
