An old favourite

[Demonperformer]

This is one of my favourite open clusters, and is now back in the morning skies; M41.  Image reduced to 30% size to help deal with those horrible halos.

Clearly I have three desperate needs:

(1) Getting better at polar aligning - to reduce tracking

(2) A decent (or even half-decent!) APO scope - to get rid of the halos

(3) An EL panel to start taking flats - to get rid of the vignetting

And there was me thinking the new mount would be the last thing I would have to buy ....

The best 11 lights, 20 darks, master bias. Stacked in DSS (kappa-sigma-clip Kappa:2 Iteration:5) and "played with" in PS7 (I'm sure this could be improved, but I'm still learning my way around PS).

Thanks for looking.