DaveS

Launching near the equator is all right provided you aren't aiming for a polar orbit, in which case a site nearer the pole is needed, hence Spaceport Sutherland and Saxa Vord. Spaceport Cornwall is predicated on horizontal launches and landing. Dreamchaser is already lined up as a landing customer but we dropped the ball by not buying up Virgin Orbit when they went bankrupt.

That's good to know, let's hope they don't drop the ball again.

Just to throw a grenade into the discussion, I find Cartes du Ciel best for telescope control, but it doesn't have a pretty desktop. For planning a session I use Stellarium on my desktop computer.

We are one of the largest satellite building nations, but we are now playing a very late catch up where launching is concerned. We were the sixth country to launch a satellite ( Why so late? It's not as if we lacked the ability) but the ONLY country to give up that ability. As I said above, I blame the lack of science qualifications in the civil service and among MPs.

The negativity that you might perceive is born of my frustration at our lack of progress in launching, when I see any number of US private companies (Not just SpaceX) launching satellites.

On NOW.

We put a satellite into orbit in 1971 despite government interference, then promptly went to sleep. I blame a mentality in the civil service that knowing Ovid is more important than understanding Schrödinger.

If they're talking about what we laughably call the UK Space Industry then they need to get in touch with Jordan Wright, the Angry Astronaut. isn't it ironic the the best informed person is an Anglophile American?

Ah, you posted before me. Yes, should be interesting to some, but I expect to hear the usual complaints that it's not stargazing.

The OP should take very much note of what Carole has to say, she's been doing AP for longer than most here, including with DSLRs and her images have won awards on other fora. M101 is a very difficult target, especially under suboptimal conditions. If you want to keep on without a tracking mount due to financial restrictions then wide angle images of bright targets is the way to go. This might be about the cheapest tracking mount available. https://www.firstlightoptics.com/equatorial-astronomy-mounts/omegon-minitrack-lx-quattro-ns.html

I started out with a little Dixon's "Prinz" 60 mm 'frac, but it looks to be of a better quality than the Tasco specimen in the video. I will agree about the mount, pretty rubbish, but just needs putting on something a bit more stable. It got me into serious astronomy and didn't put me off, even with the Huygeniun EPs

The OP hasn't been back since early yesterday, has he lost interest?

I don't see those dark borders in my Dark frames, but that may be down to the software. I also don't see the bright top to the frame or the bright vertical lines. I see from the FITS header that you captured at ambient temperature, what does it look like at the set point, -26 degrees? For reference, here is a stack of 300 sec darks from my camera at -25 degrees, captured in maxim with the Moravian driver. I make no claim as to the perfection or otherwise of my Dark frame, but the camera was bought new.

Sunsets lately have been downright filthy orange, you can see the horrid clag in the air.

This is the result of "polishing a turd" Over the "nights" of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th June I captured 18 subs each of RGB with the reconstituted ODK 12 / G3 16200 rig, After fighting the rubbish data for a couple of days I decided to forget about colour and just stack all 54 subs with a Master Dark. After cropping and gradient removal BlurX and NoiseX were applied in PI, then two rounds of Histogram Stretch with a DDP in between in AstroArt 8. Saved as a PNG. I had to hammer the background down much further than I would like, and it's still horrible. Moral of the story: don't try to image a low surface brightness galaxy under rubbish conditions. the combination of nautical dark, near full moon, and clag raised my normal mid Bortel 3 sky to more like 8-9.

The longer we go without rain the worse the sky becomes with haze and fine dust. Where I am the sky during the day is a milky blue and at night the combination of nautical dark, full moon and clag raises my normal mid Bortle 3 to more like 8-9.The next rain will leave my car looking like a barn find unless we have a torrential downpour.

I just saw this from Ed Ting. I'm putting this here, hoping the Mods will move it to somewhere they consider more appropriate.

Yep, easy naked eye.

He's not happy.

I have actually seen M33, one early winter night when I had got up to shut down the imaging. A faint but definite fuzzy blob. I wondered what it was, only realised that it was M33 after looking on Stellarium. It was quite a spectacular night with Auriga glittering with clusters. LP map says 21.7

Globs are hard work, but at least cut through twilight skies (all we have at the moment).

I captured 3 hours of Luminance on the 27th, so after working it up in PI I made an LRGB image in AstroArt 8 Not sure if it's added much, but heigh ho!

The "other" GC in Hercules. This wasn't really intended as an image, I just wanted to check that having put my location into Maxim, PixInsight would be able to use it in the post processing. This is just an hour each RGB in 5 min subs with the ODK 12 / Trius setup. PI did deal with the data, MPCC, then RGB combination, PCC (SPCC gave a very blue result, due to not having a QE curve for the 694 sensor) then BlurX, NoiseX and Masked Stretch. Saturation boost in AstroArt 8 and saved as a PNG

Oh yes, I like that. Unfortunately, Galaxy Season is well and truly over for this year here, we lose all Astro Dark until the 16th July, and I'm on the south west coast. I posted my last very poor galaxy image yesterday.

As posted in the competition thread, this is just barely enough data to make an image, 3 hours RGB in Bin 2 and 3 hours Luminance in Bin 1, all in 600 sec subs. Captured on the 21st (RGB) and 24th (Lum), mostly in Nautical Dark. Stacked and RGB combination in AstroArt 8 (MPCC didn't like my data), cropped and gradient removal. Then into PI for SPCC, BlurX, NoiseX and Masked Stretch (Which did a better job than ArcSinH Stretch), then back to AstroArt for LRGB synthesis and a light Unsharp Mask. I need new Flats, as I had to push the background down further than I would like, plus there's a swarm of brightly coloured noise just below the floor. ODK12, SX694, Baader LRGB filters. DDM 85, Maxim DL6, ASA software package. And that's it for Galaxy Season, no more Astro DArk until the 16th July so will have to look at NB targets, Boo.