Finally some images again, M64, M51, M63

[astrovirus]

Hi there,

Finally the weather has started cooperating again here in the Netherlands. Had decent weather during our club's spring starparty, but unfortunately due to some technical difficulties and small cloud fields rolling at the wrong moment (at least for me) I have only been able to capture 50 min of data on M64. Furthermore due to the amount of dust that has gotten into my camera during the modding of it, it was a pain to process this image, especially since my lightbox has stopped providing descend results for some strange reason. So I shot some flats this weekend using a new DIY lightbox/EL panel based on an old laptop backlight and decided to just give them a try on this shot I had still lying around.

Over the Easter weekend I was out on 3 nights with reasonable conditions and shot M51, M64, and M63. Again due to technical issues with guiding and Nebulosity crashing (was a first timer for me), the nights on M51 and M64 only provide 50 minutes of data for M51 (planned over 2 hours of exposure, but guiding suddenly stopped, giving nice star trails on the remaining frames), and no data on M64 as the software failed on the first light frame of the series and wouldn't come back alive functioning.

On Sunday night things worked out better, although again guiding stopped after about an Hour or so, but this time I was able to follow everything remotely by teamviewer and the laptop from our livingroom. Turned out that the guider cable was losing contact with the mount due to some stress on it, will have to take a good look at my cable management next time out. However still got nearly 3 hours of exposures to work with.

Details:

M64, shot March 5/6, 10x 5 minutes, 1600ISO. 10 darks and 20 bias frames, using 20 flats from last weekend.

M51, April 22/23, 10x 5 minutes at ISO800, 6 darks, 20 flats, 20 bias.

M63, April 24/25, 34x 5 minutes at ISO800, 24 darks, 20 flats, and 20 bias.

Shot with my Baader ACF modded 350D, but with the peltier cooling operating at the moment.

Scope Skywatcher BKP2001 on NEQ6

Guided with QHY5/9x50 finder guider

All frames preprocessed with DSS and postprocessed with CS 3.

Thanks for watching,

Regards Tim

[steppenwolf]

Very nice indeed, especially the M51 - lovely in a widefield context

[EdF_uk]

Stunning images.

Ed