Tough lessons learnt

[Johns22]

It's been a tough week of Astro this week! I thought it started well on Monday with a clear sky, I eagerly headed out to setup my Skywatcher 200P on EQ5 Goto mount. For the first time I managed to get it all working via my laptop including my Canon 600D with just 2 days of the Backyard EOS trial left. Unfortunately my new power pack had leaked battery acid during the previous charge which doesn't bode well and will need to be returned.

I admit I got greedy and set my imaging run on M42 at 50 x 60 sec exposures with 10 sec pauses. The run completed and the previews in Backyard EOS looked great but the following day I was met with disappointment when I reviewed the images and Deepskystacker rejected them all. Having spent a few hours since reading on here it seems I was well over on the exposures as I don't have a guidescope/camera. It felt like a night wasted.

A few books I purchased landed this week including Turn Left at Orion. When Clear Skies appeared last night I decided to head out with the DSLR on a tripod using both the kit lens and the 300mm lens. Once again I got greedy on M42, zooming in on the 300mm lens with 10 sec exposures on the untracked mount. Once again the final images were disappointing and another night lost. More reading tonight has shown me the error of my ways...

Lessons learnt the tough way. On the plus side I seem to have had a good second-hand buy on a CLS clip in filter to help with my light pollution which arrived today.

Whilst the power pack is being replaced, I've arranged with my local astro society to be shown how to collimate my 200P - I've noticed the secondary mirror adjusters have been loose on the scope housing. The primary mirror looks to have quite a bit of dust on it - the previous owner must have stored the scope with no cap on. I may take this opportunity to clean the mirror (following advice I've seen on YouTube) before collimating.

It feel's like I'm still at the foot of a very big mountain - but still enthusiastic! 

[Aramcheck]

I've found that Pixinsight can stack sets of subs which DSS (on it's default settings) rejects, particularly when my stars are egg-shaped. The results of one of my early nights imaging were badly out of focus, but I still managed to get something out of it by using PI's Dynamic Alignment tool, which meant manually selecting the stars to align on. A bit tedious, but at least the evening wasn't completely wasted!

Cheers
Ivor

[Johns22]

Thanks Ivor - I have Adobe Photoshop too and I'm sure I've seen somewhere you can stack in there. So much information to absorb on all aspects!