Anybody know what this is?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

This is supposed to be M44 based on my goto HEQ5, but it looks nothing like the view on Starry Night.

Here's the details, I put a 135mm camera lens on the Atik16HR to avoid any guiding issues as I couldn't be bothered after a very long day at work (don't ask). I thought that it was a great idea, at first, but I had certain "issues" as the night wore on. First up, there's no finder, so I trusted the mount to go close to the alignment star ( Castor ). After some panning about I got a view that looked like it cuold be Castor and it's environs. I then told it to point to M44 an it shot off in the direction where M44 lives. I then took three frames to see what came up, but it doesnt match any Beehive cluster image that I can find.

Image scale is about 4 degrees wide BTW.

Captain Chaos

[legion48]

Look like it might be NGC 2419?

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

NGC2682 methinks, with a couple more like NGC2664 and the odd galaxy that you can't see.

It makes sense as I must have aligned on Kappa Geminorium to get that error. I was confused by the fact that both have a little "setsquare" asterism around them so what I checked was Castor, wasn't.

Its a pain aiming this setup as you can't even look along the lens, there's a great big filter wheel in the way. Must knock something up to sort it out.

Captain Chaos

[themos]

There is, apparently, a Free (GNU Public License) program called gcx that can help with plate solving.

[proflight2000]

in that area captain last night I hopped onto the M67 (King Cobra) that was actually really nice, I was suprised as the neighbour had her light on, as soon as she turned it off loads of stars started to appear. Id love to see a picture of that. The one thing I have noticed with the beehive is that there are lots of 3s, triangle shapes using 3 stars, but my goto only catches 3 quarters of it, I dont think the co-ordinates are to the dead center.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

Err, that IS M67 in widefield format I think.

Captain Chaos

[barkis]

Looks awfully like M67 as I look at it in my Messier catalogue CC. Not bad either for an acccident .

Ron.