I’m not happy with this one, but it isn’t the mount’s fault. I wasn’t happy with my M101  images with the NJP, either. It’s just too dim to dig out from these urban skies. Nonetheless, here it is.

Larger version http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=27635&size=big

Finally had a decent weekend night here. No Moon, decent seeing, unusually good transparency. Grabbed NGC5907 and M101. M101 has always been a challenging object for me; the images always appear “flat” when captured from my urban location. I spent more time than usual gathering data on this relatively dim extended object, hoping that the combination of more exposure time and lower-than-usual skyglow will make a difference. We’ll see what I get when I process that one. The other galaxy is a new target for me and I think it came out nicely.

The mount appeared to perform well. No wind and no discarded frames in several hours of steady work. It would have been a good night for some data gathering but I wanted to enjoy the unusually good conditions rather than doing work. Next time there’s decent seeing but a full Moon I’ll do it.

Larger version at http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=27634&size=big

Clear sky, light wind, good transparency, and no Moon. If it were a weekend I’d have gotten a lot done tonight. As it is, I have to be in the office tomorrow morning and I’ve already stayed up too late. Checked the seeing just before I shut down and my urban surroundings (plenty of asphalt, concrete, brick, etc.) were still dumping lots of heat. Translates to big stars (FWHM around 3 arcseconds) in long exposures and dancing stars in short exposures.  No use trying to record tracking errors with the centroid moving around on its own but I can image if I can live with fat stars and some funky star shapes. I gave Starlock a star below 30 degrees declination this time (the handbox warns if using one farther from the celestial equator but I’ve been ignoring it) and let it set up the guide rates (ended up 16 and 10) and then cleared PEC and trained it and added one update run. Chose M51 as a target because it’s near zenith (reduced seeing effects) and because it is in a star-poor region; I wanted to see if Starlock could find something on which to guide. It did, and seemed to work well.

Talked to the guys at Meade today and was told not to read too much into the recorded pec data; I’ll have to wait for good skies to evaluate tracking. I might still be within the 10 arcsecond p-p some are reporting.

SO – here’s what I got tonight in about 90 minutes of shooting LRGB. Larger version is at http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=27559&size=big

-edit- Fixed the star shapes; shouldn’t try to stack images at 3:00am! Accidentally left the blue frames unselected when aligning in CCDStack2. Fixing that made the stars round plus improved detail generally.

Here we go. Trying to use the mount’s features as though I had no imaging experience. Assisted drift alignment, auto guide calibration, auto PEC train, Starlock guiding. Anyone would be able to do these procedures. Then I picked an easy target (Moon about to rise) and started shooting. The image has flaws; AT12RC needs to be collimated, for one thing. FWHM was nearly 3 arcseconds in short focus exposures. The mount, though, appears to have done a good job; FWHM didn’t increase much on longer exposures; just enough to account for seeing variations. There were no discarded light frames. When I get the FWHM down below 2 arcseconds we’ll get a more rigorous test of tracking.

You can see a larger version here:  http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=27431&size=big