"... and now for something completely different"

[wimvb]

Or, what happens when you leave your autoguiding setup unattended.

The other night (28 dec, actually) I thought I try my hands at the Iris nebula (NGC 7023). Set up, aligned, etc, etc. Got guiding to work (Lin_guider on Raspberry Pi) and started a series of 20 12 minutes exposures.

Sometime during the third exposure clouds rolled in and spoiled about 4 exposures. But then it cleared up again. I was quite unaware of this, sitting inside and doing other stuff (like haning out on this forum). When I got back outside after 4 hours, it had clouded over and I packed it in for the night.

Examining the night's catch, I noticed that only two subs had the Iris right in the center. All the other exposures had just an unknown starfield. Just for fun I stacked the images and sent them to astrometry.net for solving. Here's what the sky looks like at RA 20 h 41 mins 31 secs, DEC 72 deg, 27 mins, 4 secs, right between Draco and Cepheus. A whole lot of nothingness. And I wasn't going for a Hubble Deep Field either.

Enjoy!

Happy new year to all.

[Tim]

Can see at least one fuzzy in there

[wimvb]

Where? I can't find any. Neither can Astrometry nor PixInsight. On the other hand, guiding was "slightly" off, to say the least:

[toxic]

at least you took the scope cover off and got 2 subs

 

[wimvb]

Yes, but unfortunately PI won't stack fewer than 3 images. I have about eleven of this void.

Happy new year