Carina up close and personal

[MarsG76]

Greeting Astrolings, 

I'm currently in the process of imaging "the pencil" Nebula, but seeing that it's not clearing my obsy roof until past midnight, I didn't want to waste half of clear nights (since they're rare) so before continuing on the pencil, I did a random frame up on eta Carina and used a random star that popped up in the OAG FOV.

I ended up doing this over a couple of nights but last night I had a bout of cloud cover for about an hour... and the Nebula drifted.

PHD moved the mount looking for a guide star locking in on some noise and attempting to move it to the guide position. What resulted was, when the clouds passed and a guide star popped up, PHD grabbed it and continued imaging, except that the framing moved 2/3 of the way down... and I ended up with subs for the bottom part of eta Carina.

I had plenty of subs from the previous night of the top part, so I created this mosaic... Talk about a accidental 2 pane mosaic!!! 

Accidently created my first DSO mosaic.

This consists of 24 x 300s (top half) and 18 x 300s (bottom half) ISO400 using the modded 40D at the 8SE native focal length of 2032mm.

Clear skies.

MG

[MarsG76]

Eta Carina Nebula cropped and slightly adjusted so that it's not so pink.