Finally a clear patch! NGC2237 Rosette

[upahill]

I set up yesterday despite a bad forecast to try and fix a cabling and power issue, as the night drew in I noticed the clouds starting to clear a little so stayed setup.

In total managed about 2 hours of clear imagining - a lot of the subs I took though were pretty dire - I think in reality whilst it looked clear to the eye there was a lot of moisture in the air, and maybe some high cloud too.

After calibration I was down to 10 good subs of 180seconds. Decided to quickly process it today to practice, a few tweaks to reduce smaller stars (I prefer the look slightly) other than that I havent done too much - will wait for more data.

Im just so happy the clouds cleared for a while, I had to share!

[Demonperformer]

Sometimes we just have to keep going through the dodgy conditions and get what we can. Very nice result for 30m data.

[Seanelly]

Good results.

[upahill]

Got out again last night and had a really good session, the data I was getting was much nicer than the other night.
Also managed a straight 6 hour run with only 2 failed subs!! Unheard of for me.

Too better flats as well now I figured out the auto expose setting in APT. Probably could have done more darks but was getting late and I was tired.

Scope got its first bit of frost too

[upahill]

Well I went back to the tutorials today and used the rather comprehensive Light Vortex Astronomy guide to reprocess this data, the shot above was a quick dump into DSS and a 30 minute play around with processing but for the next shot I went back and recalibrated, stacked and processed purely in pixinsight. The last time I did this on the heart nebula I was impressed, so figured it was worth another go.

Subframe selector told me there was a few duds in the set, so eradicated them and used superbias. I took my calibration shots in a hurry and didn't take as many as I should have really.

This is the results of about 6 hours playing around following along with the tutorial....

I have set up again tonight with the promise of 5-6 hours clear sky, so hopefully should be able to push this up to 10-12 hours of data later this week As it stands this around 65 x 5 mins.

Still not getting round stars so first job tonight is check my alignments and recalibrate PHD.