It’s windy, too windy to do any serious imaging but at least it’s dry.  The clouds are obviously orange where the street lights illuminate them and they’re scuttling across the sky slowly enough to obscure guide stars but quick enough to not completely ruin a 2 minute exposure.

I’ve solved the slewing to wrong location issue, I’m not sure how but it did coincide with me reverting to an older version of ASCOM and adopting Cartes du Ciel in preference to the StarCalc.

Since the last imaging session I’ve:

• Switched back to the Canon 300d for imaging with the Atik 16ic for guiding
• Installed dual-speed focuser
• Installed Baader MPCC
• Installed Skyglow filter
• Changed Laptop to donated Acer
• Adopted Cartes du Ciel as my planetarium platform
• Designed, built and installed a long-exposure device for the Canon
• Designed, coded and installed long-exposure software

Not too many changes then

I’ve been waiting all week for a gap in the clouds and tonight, even though the conditions are far from perfect, I took a chance and imaged M42 with 10 x 120 seconds at iso800. While focusing I noticed the collimation is out but the batteries are dead in my laser collimator so I won’t be able to do anything about it tonight. Maybe I can use out of focus bright stars to collimate, I’ll post some focusing images to show what I mean.

In hindsight, I wish I’d taken 30 sec, 60 sec, 90 sec and 120 sec images to allow me to make a HDR composite image, but this was only a test session to make sure everything works.

So here’s my M42, it’s 8 x 120 seconds stacked with DSS (DeepSkyStacker) and taken in windy conditions:

M42

M42 the Orion Nebula (iso800, 8 x 120 seconds, Canon 300d, Baader MPCC, Skywatcher 10" Newtonian, EQ6, EQMOD)

I’m happy with the round stars across the whole image, even with the windy conditions they’re better than I’ve ever imaged before.

Now I need some clear skies …