On occasion when my go-tos have been way off it amazes me how hard it can be to locate some objects with a smallish CCD. A good way to spend an hour or so! It only has to be a fraction off.
Almost as good as my 100 minutes of 10 mins subs through the Bathinov mask!
It's all good fun.......
I've got the permanent pier in, and everything on top under a Telegizmo cover and for about three seconds last night, I could see a star!!!!!!
At least you got to see a star field!
Yeah Troy I do but with some targets you need to do long subs and even then you are not sure if you've got it as they are very faint in unprocessed TIF files even after some stretching but not having imaged the area before I wasn't sure what to expect
What capture software are you using? CCDsoft stretches the downloaded image so even a faint galaxy will show in a 4-10 second image. If it won't show even with that then it would probably not show in a normal long exposure either (say 2-3 hours total).
One exception is the Vela Supernova Remnant which hardly shows anything under a 1 minute exposure unless you are using O111 filters.
I sometimes open up a downloaded 10 minute test frame in CCDstack to check it out before committing to a 5 hour run. Especially to check focus and guiding errors.
Well, at least you got something! I remember years ago taking some 60min hand guided exposures with film, only to find that I had the exposure set at 1/1000 sec !?!
Anyway, which starfield near NGC3576 were you after ???
My other good trick is to set the imager running in single image mode without setting it to auto (ie: take 8 or 10 images) and walk off for an hour or so. Much fun.
I did this the other night. The Gemini wasn't playing ball. I was after the Rho Ophiuchus region and shot off a 5 minute test exposure. It was a very pretty starfield but was nowhere near Antares!
Haven't done that yet, but sure I will...
... Story of my (astro)life.
