[Rusty2]

Hello !

I firstly just want to say what breath taking pictures you people are capturing , I'm always stunned when I look at them : )

This has been a long and slow journey for me mainly because I don't have a lot of time and the clouds seem to know what I'm up to . I've bought myself a steep learning curve but I've been doing my homework : (

I believe I've now got the basics to start capturing data which I've managed to do on 2 seperate nights recently , with long exposures and nice round stars : )

My first question is , how does one combine data from multiple nights ? Do you just jam all the "Lights" together , all the "Darks" together ? Last night I was experimenting with exposures lengths . 5 minute exposures didn't seem to bring out quite enough detail so I want to do longer exposures on the same target as well . Do I have to process each night seperately ?

My second question is about Phd2 . I've been practising drift aligment for the last 3 months or so , intermittently . I now have my alignment so close that the purple error circle is so small you couldn't physically improve it any further . BUT..........the trend line still shows a small deviation away from a dead flat line . Although there is a deviation , guided long exposures are still producing nice round stars .

In the drift alignment tool , I have my Y setting at Y: +/-4" . This seems to show up inconcistencies much more than Y: +/-8" .

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated : )
Russell / Rusty / Russ