From: Mark Gaffney <markgaffney@me.com>

Date: October 31, 2010 3:44:29 PM MDT

To: "Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com" <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] NGC 7331 and friends..

That's a really nice one Milton!

Weather here has been either rainy or cloudy most of spring ( perhaps an isolated night where I can see enough stars to do an alignment or when the eastern sky will stay clear..)

I've been continuing my attempts at M 42. I had one night where I managed a moderately successful 300 second sub with the Nikon & guided by Astro IIDC. I progressed to a 600 second sub but must have re-calibrated whilst M 42 was directly on the meridian. The CG-5 stops tracking for a few minutes at the meridian I believe.

I haven't sent you the guide logs from that night as I believe you've had enough of my poor figures when guiding & I've scarcely had a chance to work on improving them. I think the last examples I sent were based upon guiding on Hot pixels..which must have thrown both of us.

Last night was the first chance I had to image in ages but I found that my fixed focus for the Kwiq guide scope was out because I'd been showing my uncle things at a different FL..!

An out of focus Betelgeuse was passing diagonally across the Scorpion's FOV to beyond upper right somewhere ( though mostly in the Live View window on the computer of the Nikon)

I gave up as I couldn't locate it. Today I'll focus the Kwiq- Scorpion on my telegraph pole down the front again. Focus on stars is a bit of a tweak from there..Overcast again today though..!

Mark.

Sent from my iPod

On 01/11/2010, at 7:58 AM, milton_aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com> wrote:

Hi Folks;

I managed to image the "Deer Lick Galaxy Cluster" centered on NGC 7331:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Astro_IIDC/files/DSO/NGC7331_MJA_20101030.jpg

last night. C8 @ 1150 mm Fl, Astro Don LRGB filters using Cooled Grasshopper with 15 min Luma (1x1 binned) and then binned 2x2 R 6 min, G 4 min and blue 3 min. Total of 2.3 hours of exposures. The image is 1.25 arc seconds per pixel.

I had very stable skies (FWHM 3.5 to 4.5 arc seconds), with fairly dark skies (about 17,000 ADU sky background with 15 minute exposures and a LPR filter) initially. The tracking log and graph were basically "flat" for a change. I had 10 second periods where there were no guiding corrections needed at all, so Astro IIDC was correcting for the mount, not chasing turbulence for a change.

Thin cloud kept drifting in from the west and I cut short my attempt at imaging M74, as it was basically lost in the increasing light pollution / clouds.

TTYL..

Milton Aupperle