My most technically challenging shot yet.
I updated the Synscan firmware to 3.35, that seems to have fixed the way-off goto accuracy of the scope. So finally, I can just plug in an object and it slews to dead-on, amazing.
I also got the polar alignment fairly accurate at lower altitudes, but when the scope slewed right up towards the zenith, it lost a lot of its accuracy & I could only take 20-30 sec subs. Is that expected? should I have done another polar alignment of a star higher up?
Anyway, I took 120 (one hundred and twenty!!) subs at only 20 secs, as a fun test to see how much I could extract. not too bad I think, though longer subs appear much more effective, from the other shots I've seen here.
Reduced the ISO to 400 from 800. Think I'll go bak to 800!
For first time I rotated the focuser to get a better composition. Risky/scary due to moving the image around, but think it was worth it.
A disaster happened though, somehow the camera got into a weird Jpeg resolution mode, without my knowledge, so I ended up with 120 pretty small jpegs, not raw files. Grrr. It was a beyatch to stack, and had horrid artefacts and gradients. But that was good in a way, as it forced me to try using Pixinsight to stack instead of DSS. Wow, it was very effective at fixing the gradients, so here is the result of the PI process. Wide enough for you?!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/48232585@N00/14382589049
