It’s been a little overcast for the last week or so, but Friday was clear and although there was some high cloud I managed to get a few hours imaging before the bigger clouds rolled in.

My plan was to get more familliar with the EQMOD software and also practice remote control to make sure there were no issues to overcome. As it turned out the system worked like a dream, I did an initial n-star alignment which uses the information from your first star alignment when slewing to the next so after finding the first star it’s a piece of cake to find another 2 or 3. Once aligned I returned into the house to see what I could see.

It seems the trick to being able to align EQMOD whilst peering through the finder is to use a wireless game controller, someone has managed this with a Wii controller but I’ll be happy if I can get a cheap gamepad from PC-World to work.

The sky was still light when I started viewing so I panned around a few clusters just to make sure the goto was accurate and also to tweak the camera settings. This done I managed to image M29 which was missing from my chart and also re-imaged some of the big globular clusters noteably M13 and M15. These have turned out better than my earlier efforts and will be appearing on my Messier chart shortly.

I’m still having trouble imaging above 30 seconds which appears to be down to inacuracy with the mount. All the forums suggest stripping the mount, removing the goo that has been smeared over the moving parts and replacing this with a high quality lubricant. There’s also a good chance that steel (or whatever alloy they’ve used) from the castings can get into the gears which can be removed at the same time as the regreasing so I think this will be somewhere near the top of my next things-to-do list. The downside of fixing the tracking will be that I’ll need to add amp-off to my modded camera but that’s something I can live with. Alternatively I may be looking at the Atik 16ic, or Canon 350D but maybe not until next year.

Now that I can use Starry Night and EQMOD to locate targets I thought I’d have a look for some non-Messier targets for a change. I managed to get a small planetary nebula caled NGC6210 which shows as a small fuzzy blue ball. I also got NGC7027 which was too bright to pick up detail from but which appears as a stretched star, or perhaps 2 stars very close together. A short exposure of Cygni 52 in the Veil Nebula didn’t pick up any nebulosity but I think a much wider field of view would also be required to do this target justice.

My verdict on the EQMOD is a big thumbs up. It does everything you would need it to do and works as well for the static observatories as it does for people like me having to setup the mount every session. I need to get the MOSAIC add-on working next to see if I can pickup larger structures like the Veil and Pelican, but there’s no rush, with so much to learn I’m sure I’ll image all these things in time.