After arriving home from the Newcastle Astronomical Society meeting, I noted stars were out, but partly cloudy, I set up the 10 inch anyway in the surprisingly cold night air. After locating the planetary nebula He2-72, just NE of the Running Chicken nebula IC 2944 more cloud terminated the first sub early. The it cleared completely and I started the 1 hour imaging run. I was nodding off after that and besides the crescent moon had by then risen. It was so cold I had to put on my freezer suit midway through the run, talk about crazy weather.
Image is 6x10 mins ISO400, IDAS uv/ir and Baader uhc-s filters, Baader MPCC coma corrector. Hutech Modded 350D camera. Hand guided by q guider in the off axis guider putting highly magnified guidestar image on laptop on a virtual reticle and using drive corrector on RA and hand slowmotion control on Dec. Seeing looked terrible, guidestar was swimming and boiling, sometimes almost dissapearing into a blurry mass, not helped by the very cold night air being colder then the scope that was bought out from the insulated garage. Im surprised the stars are as sharp as they are.I was almost chasing the seeing as I guided. The sky was very dark though, the subs had sky background noticably darker then normal even with the UHCS filter. This planetary nebula appears on Bert's widefield image of the
nearby nebula.
Scott
