Hi Alex,
Michael was the technical expert with the networking but let me tell you it was really freezing outside last night. Good for the camera chip but not so good for humans! We were very happy to be sitting inside in the warm. So very effective from this angle too. Only thing you need to keep an eye out for clouds.
We worked out where south is and just polar allign the Eq6 through the polar scope. This is pretty good for low focal length photos - we get about 1-2mins. We had trained the PEC too (why not!). It took us all of 5mins to find the asterism (4 to realise you have to pull the counterweight shaft out too see through the polarscope - I'll take the credit for that one!
). After that a 1 star allign and we were plain sailing.
Thanks Jase. It was fascinating the number of objects we could see in the image and fun to watch the detail emerging in front of our eyes. Challenging keeping the background / dust details without overexposing the nebula is a real challenge. I daresay it would be possible to do better with the processing -must read up more on how this can be best done. Not nearly up to the cosmicphotos standards yet - but its all good fun learning.
Michael might be able to give a few more details on how we did all the networking and computer communications.
Cheers,
David