The weather forecast was right, the temperature is dropping to -4 degrees C tonight. But while some moan and shiver I was straight out with the scope and had it all setup within 30 minutes of ariving home from work.  I’ve been imaging since about 6pm this evening, this being the first chance since adjusting the DEC axis. 

Initially I needed to fine tune the gear mesh but that didn’t take long and I had the scope locked onto the Ring Nebula in no time.  I took 320×20 second exposures and ring hovered around the center of the screen the whole time. It’s an improvement from images drifting off the edge of the screen, but still room for improvement. That said, my polar alignment was hurried and I didn’t take much time to balance the mount, so maybe the errors are as much down to me now and not the play in the mount.

I’ve gradually moved up the sky since my first alignment by slewing to a star then adding it to my n-star alignment list, then removing the lowest of the previous stars from the list. This way I’ve managed to get from Rasalhague to Ruchbah without having to realign the mount. I’m moving ever closer to Mirfak so I hope to finish with some comet images, but beofre then I’m working on M103, The Owl Cluster (NGC457) and I’m going to see if I can get the Pac-Man Nebula as well.

I’m still imaging so hopefully this entry will be updated before the night is over.