Well, it's been an eternity since I've done any imaging. We were away in Europe for a couple of months over Xmas, so the gear got packed up in storage. And, of course, summer in Brisbane is just wonderful for opportunities as well, assuming you can dodge the clouds. So, I took my time setting up again. I also took the opportunity to update everything - drivers, software, etc. Only a couple of things "broke" that required extra work to fix, so I was happy enough with that.
I recently got some of the gear setup again - I was doing some fiddling with configurations and probably need a couple of different connectors to get things working better (to reduce vignetting and make a flatter field to the edge of the image). I also had to clean a lot of things, including the filters that somehow got a lot of dust on them. I must not have packed them away properly.
I tried using Sharpcap for PA and it was brilliant.
I'll do some verification tests at another time to see how good it is, but it was reporting less than 1'. I didn't want to spend too much time on it as I wanted to grab a bit of data to process later and I knew the forecast was for - guess what - more clouds to come over again.
So, this is what I could manage before those clouds arrived. A poor seagull that needs a lot more data.
L: 20 x 1 min
R: 18 x 1 min
G: 18 x 1 min
B: 17 x 1 min
Taken with the ZWO ASI1600MM-C on the Sharpstar 107PH with a 0.67FR, cropped to remove vignetting and some basic processing in PixInsight.
Large version:
https://flic.kr/p/Rd4EcL
Here's hoping for better weather soon so I can actually work on a target for a decent amount of time!
