Eagle Nebula QHY8 and VC200L
Eagle nebula was my target for tonight. The night started out looking like it might be a good one, quite cold with little atmospheric turbulance, no moon and all the gear on, running and ready to go.
I started by aligning the mount on a handful of bright stars. The mount stopped partway through a slew due to a poor connection at the comm port so back to the begining, a computer reboot and a mount realignment.
I swung round to Eagle and fired up PHD guiding all looking good then PHD stopped and the qguider stopped functioning, a problem I have had off and on for a while. A new set of drivers installed to see if it would fix the problem and away I went again.
I started imaging and went inside to sit in the warm and watch the imaging on my laptop in the lounge. Cold here so my wife stoked up the fire. I took 10 X 20 minute exposures and thought that would be ample for this nebula. When I finally examined the images I realised the smoke from the fire had generously drifted across the top of the Observatory and had ruined 6 of the images.
Not my night obviously so here it is Eagle Nebula 4 X 20 minute exposures calibrated with darks taken duing the day today.
Hope you enjoy. And please don't laugh to hard.
Telescope: Vixen VC200L at F9 (1800mm)
Camera: QHY8 OSC cooled CCD
Mount: G11 with Gemini
Guiding: QHY5 and ED80 when it worked.
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