M27 - First Night Out Guiding. Maybe SCT's aren't so bad.

[CKemu]

Tonight promised to be clear, so despite grey clouds and a rather soggy garden - I set up.

By 23:30 I had drift aligned, focused and plugged in my friends laptop, to try guiding my scope. This would be the first time my ST-80/SSAG had attempted guiding my LX90 8" SCT.

I went back to M27, an object I had tried to photograph previously. Mostly because I had a good mental frame of reference for what I had been able to get out of this object before.

The BBC, MET Office and my iPad's Weather App suggested that I had a clear night ahead, and when that first shot showed up on the back of my D300, I was excited. Alas clouds and then Moon/Sun rise obliterated a lot of my shots, and PHD lost tracking rather violently.

Despite the weather breaking, this has to be the best shot of M27 I have ever taken, and am really, REALLY happy, I was starting to loose a bit of faith in my ability to do astrophotography, made worse by a certain "alone" feeling, I am totally self taught at this, my only help coming from kind people on forums like this - to whom a massive thank you is given.

Anyhow, gone to town on this one, so apologies for the over abundance of stuff:

First of all the basic data:

• ISO 3200 | 25 x 4 minute lights | 10 x 4 minute darks
  
• Location: Lincoln, England
  
• Conditions: Light Pollution: 5/10 | Clear with long spells of cloud
  

My M27 - Dumbbell Nebula - Final Edit:

Animated GIF of the Sub Frames Taken:

Snapshot taken on my phone of the PHD graph:

If that wasn't enough already, well I made a brief video blog of tonight's activities, so if you can withstand some rambling:

Impromptu Video Blog

[RogerTheDodger]

Nice image

[Johnboy2011]

Great shot, love all the info! It must feel great to get some payoff for the effort you are putting in!

John

[steppenwolf]

Excellent, pleased to see someone getting outside - I looked, I saw thin cloud, went to bed checked at just after 2.00 am clearish but bright and as I watched I saw the cloud coming back in!!

[Simms]

Great report, only reading this on Tap-a-talk on iphine at the moment so images not very clear - but looks like your alignment and guiding are bang on. I am very new to PHD, how does one access that graph?

[ollypenrice]

Very well done indeed. The tracking is excellent. Could you have got away with longer subs, I wonder? I'm not a fan of the fork mount but you have got this one working really well. Fine colour in the nebula, too.

Olly

[CKemu]

Great report, only reading this on Tap-a-talk on iphine at the moment so images not very clear - but looks like your alignment and guiding are bang on. I am very new to PHD, how does one access that graph?

From PHD's main window you go to Tools>Enable Graph - it's rather nice to get a visual read out on what your scope and PHD are doing.

Thank you all for the kind words, it's really rather rewarding to get an image at the end of a night, especially as I have had some utterly horrendous results and all sorts of problems.

I've barely been awake for a decent amount of time, and have a blinding headache for my efforts, but decided to do a little touch up on the image, I noticed that on some devices the image was showing up with a yellow/grey halo around the nebula, so tweaked the levels a little more. Lost a few faint stars, but hopefully gained a more pleasing result.

[Telrad]

Really good image of M27 and excellent capture. Well done. I tried viewing this last night, no such luck as the clouds rolled in..

[Coco]

Congratulations, you've done a great job and got a very nice image also, more importantly you're confidence is back, imaging in september/october when you have more time and are less hurried..