As a spur of the moment decision last night, I got out the EQ6 and the vixen R200SS with ED80 guide scope and plonked it on the ground roughly facing south, no polar alignment or mucking about with drift alignment. I set up at 10.30pm and packed up at 2.30am. What I did next was to test out the TV guider I have, and for me it wasn't working, so I changed it and whacked on the GPUSB and the toucam. Unbelievable it guided where the TV guider just ran away (I really need to work on this it shouldn't be that hard).
I took the Sword of Orion in a number of shots, 2x10 seconds, 4 x 30 second, 4 x 60 seconds, 8 x 120 seconds, 7 x 180 seconds and 15 x 240 seconds at ISO 400 with the cooled 350D running at 4 degrees Celsius. So thats 6200seconds or a tad over 103 minutes, and I have never taken anything at ISO400 in the city light pollution. I have yet to learn how to process these properly and because of my highly technical setting up there was some rotation. Also temperature killed the original focus I had, I should have realised it but hey its the first of the season for me.
this shot is a conglomeration of everything just thrown into the pot just to see what I had
, its crap but I like it - as i did it myself
. All I need to do now is learn how to process the data I have and see how the ugly duckling can be developed in to the swan (if I end up with the swan neb I will have done something really wrong
)