I managed to get the scope out last night for the first time in ten days. It was overcast with hazy gaps between the clouds and a blustery wind which tried very hard to disrupt my imaging. In a three hour session I only managed to add two M’s to my Messier Catalogue, M52 and M103. M103 was a replacement for a 1004x version of the cluster I had taken last year. Having the LX mod helped to capture the detail of this little cluster, and also picked up the colours which was nice to compare with the black and white original.

The effect of wind on the scope was very noticable, with maybe 1 in 2 frames spoiled by streaky stars. One day I’ll have an observatory to keep everything sheltered, but not until my numbers come up on the lottery!

Another breezy evening so very few usable frames last night.  I did manage to get an improved M51 so I’ve updated my Messier list, but my M57 is about the same as the one I already had and M63 and M64 had too few frames to stack.

You can see from the M51 image here that Amp glow is starting to become an issue. This image was made with 17×60 second exposures taken from an AVI with 46 frames. That’s a lot of wasted time and effort, I think some were spoiled by the PE rather than the weather, so at least I can do something about that.

M57 was taken from a stack of 42x18second exposures, however less than 20 were usable. Dropping the gamma and gain seems to help keep the backgrounds dark. I must make an effort to record the values I use for all the sliders.

It was unexpectedly clear last night so I took the decision late in the evening to get the scope out and setup in the dark. Everything went together fine, Polaris was just outside the circle so I made the final adjustments and readied myself for a couple of hours of imaging. I can’t be out too late with my alarm set for 6am so made a mental note to start packing up after midnight.

The session seemed to be going ok, I was able to find targets and went inside to leave the LX do it’s thing without me causing unnecessary vibrations. I managed to get AVIs of M16, M81, M82, M51, M31,M57, M20 and M27 with a short clip of Cor Caroli thrown in for good measure. What I hadn’t noticed, by not watching the imaging sessions, was that I had a lot of movement in the mount and my 40 second exposures where nearly all reduced to short streaks rather than fine points.

Processing has been a little disappointing with very few usable frames. This M82 is not too bad but you can see from the strange shape of the stars that things didn’t go to plan. I’ll take my time over the M31, I think I’ve got faint dust lanes outside the centre of the galaxy, but it may just be my imagination.

To think I’d re-targetted these M’s to improve on those I already had – that’ll teach me! I must sort something out with the guidescope if I’m going to get any long exposures over 40 seconds.

Hopefully the IR/UV filter will arrive tomorrow, that’ll give me something new to experiment with.

———–

I’ve just reprocessed the M82 image using K3CCDTools instead of my usual first choice Registax. I processed the result as x2 and then desaturated the image in PhotoShop. I was comparing the image with Starry Night to see what details I was missing when I noticed the star below the galaxy (to the right in the image) has an apparent magnitude of 17.6. I think this may be the faintest star I’ve imaged (and noticed) to date.