I’ve been glad of the cloud cover, it gave me a chance to catch up on my sleep! Last night was unexpectedly clear and I set everything up while cooking dinner. My first target was NGC2403 a galaxy in Camelopardalis which I’ve targetted before as it’s a bright galaxy near the northern meridian. Being so far north reduces the Periodic Error (PE) as the motors don’t have to move the mount as much as when it point’s east or west. I still need to adjust the gear mesh again as I’m sure that carrying the mount in and out of the house puts a strain on the bearings.

After 2403 I stayed roughly in the Ursa Major constellation and managed to image M82 and M101 both galaxies from the Messier catalogue (M101 needs reprocessing as this image doesn’t look like the original). I then moved on to NGC6939 an open cluster in Cepheus before finally catching the M3 Globular Cluster in Canes Venatici. With work only hours away I retired to my bed and left the processing for later.

  

NGC2403 in Camelopardalis 39×60 seconds	M82 in Ursa Major 15×60 seconds	M101 in Ursa Major 10×50 seconds
NGC6939 in Cepheus 7×40 seconds	M3 in Canes Venatici 14×30 seconds

Did you notice the images are upside-down? When I move east of the meridian the mount rotates so that images appear inverted. Maybe I’ll correct this before posting in future.

Just a couple of images tonight, I had trouble with the mount moving east-west causing the stars to elongate.  The fix is to take shorter exposures, so after trying some of the fainter objects I moved around to the brighter nebulae and Galaxies.

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Click on the images for a slide-show.I started to the east of the meridian, taking M82 and M51 but then moved west and when I realized I hadn’e taken M34 before, I took the opporunity to get a few dozen frames at 10seconds each. M42 doesn’t need more than 5 seconds per frame but the short frames were too short to pick up M42’s neighbour “the running man”.I think this M51 is one of my best, if not the best, it’s a collection of hand-picked frames from over 100×30 seconds taken. When I get better stability on the mount I’ll see if I can do 100x60seconds – that should be awesome.

What a week! I had 5 straight clear nights, not much sleep but some great viewing. My PC must have been overworked with all the processing and Thursday morning it gave up completly with a pop and smell of burning. The replacement arrived midday Friday and although I missed Friday evening I was back imaging by Saturday.

Now I have to re-install everything and that has led to an issue. K3CCDTools which I’ve used exclusively for processing FIT images requires a key which is linked to the PC. I’ve written to Peter Katreniak for a replacement registration code but I have so many images to process I’ve had to make a start with Registax.

(Received the reg code and started processing straight away – thanks Peter).

So these first images may need revisiting in the future, but for now I’ve done some quick processing.

Last evening turned into a Messier Marathon with me tackling 14 “M’s” mostly in and around Ursa Major. The purpose for me was to get an idea of what they look like so that I can target them properly, if they are within the limits of my equipment, on the next clear night.

So here they are:

M63 – Canes Venatici

M51 in Ursa Major

M3 in Canes Venatici

There are more to follow, but as with M109 (above) I suffered from misting and also from dust doughnuts and twice had to clean the CCD cover during the session. I have just returned from the local camera shop where I’ve purchased a lens cleaning cloth and a puffer brush which should make removing dust a little easier.

All images taken with Atik 16ic, 254mm (10″) Newtonian Scope on EQ6 Pro mount with EQMOD. Stacked and stretched in Registax.

I’ve had a chance to run the Orion Nebula shots through some panorama software to automate the stitching and blending and I have to say I’m very happy with the results. I was not able to add a further set of images taken the following night, but here’s the result anyway:

Click on the image to see a larger version The Great Orion Nebula M42 & M43

I’ve had to wait until nearly 1am for the M81 & M82 Galaxies to cross the meridian, but it was well worth the wait.

M81 Bode’s Galaxy in Ursa Major 30x60seconds

M82 The Cigar Galaxy in Ursa Major 28x60s + 7x120s

And here are a few more images from the same session:

NGC2403 Galaxy in Camellopardalis 18×60 seconds

NGC7023 The Iris Nebula in Cepheus 31×60 seconds

NGC7635 The Bubble Nebula 34×60 seconds

I keep returning to the Bubble but can’t seem to get a more defined shape to it.

All images are unguided, Scope=254mm Newtonian, 1200mm F/L, Atik 16ic Camera, EQ6-Pro, EQMOD