Preparation avoids losing precious clear sky time

[tomato]

I recently sold my Atik 314 OSC camera to my brother, by his own admission a novice planetary imager and completely new to DSO imaging.

I delivered the camera and we spent the best part of a day installing EQMOD for his HEQ5 and setting up his planetary IS camera for pulse guiding with PHD2, all in daylight.

A lovely clear night last night in Shropshire and after a bit of trouble star aligning through Stellarium and EQMOD, and a long USB lead dropping the guide camera signal, he obtained this 10 x 150 sec image of the Dumbbell Nebula.

The moral of the story is it certainly pays to set up and run as much as you can at your leisure in daylight, it would have been really frustrating to lose the entire night to climbing up the imaging learning curve.

And, as a bonus, the imaging session went so well that at the end I was able to get my first look at Saturn through the eyepiece since getting back into the hobby, simply stunning!