Adding guiding - improving results

[aparker]

One thing I've found is that it's hard for me to get a polar alignment quickly that is good for sharp exposures longer than about 30 sec at the image scale I'm looking at (Lodestar at 1000mm).  So I dug out an Orion 50mm scope and guide cam I had from a time a couple years back when I thought I was getting into astrophotography, and hooked it up to me EAA rig.  This is really nice, especially since PHD is now available for Mac.  As a test I stacked 4x90 sec on M51, and got a much better result than I ever have before.  The bright star forming regions in the arms are clearly visible, and a hint of the halo of tidally-scattered stars surrounding the pair is visible.  I have some other deep GX cluster shots i'll post later.

[nytecam]

Very nice guided M51 Alex.   For those that don't have the option of a separate guider both original SX s/w [Windows] and LL [Windows/Mac] will autoguide+stack during the Lodestar's camera subs if brief enough not to trail -  LL in alt-az mode too

[aparker]

Here's an extreme example of using the auto guider to enable an exposure that my quick polar alignment would not otherwise allow - 300 seconds in the vicinity of NGC3733.  In addition to the three NGC galaxies, there are 28 other fuzzy blobs (at least) that I can confirm as galaxies by reference to the SDSS image database.

It was getting late and cold so I did not attempt to stack on any additional exposures, just the one five minute capture.  My next step is to replace the tripod I'm setting up on my balcony with a permanent pier joined to the balcony corner post.  This will 1) allow me to dial in a drift alignment much better than the quick "point-at-the-NCP" ones I've been doing and maintain it from night to night by marking the mount base carefully and 2) avoid fuzzy exposures due to my moving even a little bit and vibrating the balcony while the "shutter" is open.

Now that the Lodestar and autoguider are becoming familiar and easy to use, I'm going to start working on remote mount control via Sky Safari.  Once that's done, I can move inside out of the cold, and leave the telescope alone and un-jiggled out on the balcony!