The Surfboarding Owl

[Budgie1]

I thought I was done for the season but managed another 3 hours last night before the light in the sky was too bright at 02:45.

I recently bought a HEQ5 mount from Altair Astro and FLO kindly delivered the Rowan belt kit yesterday for it, which was promptly fitted.   So I was pleased to see a clear sky in the evening so I could test it out and see what improvement there was with the guiding.

Needless to say, there was a vast improvement, although more fine tuning is needed in PHD2 to get the RMS better.

In the meantime I shot 2h 30m of 180s subs of M97 and M108. I haven't tried these two before and they were nicely positioned away from the Moon and relatively high. They're a bit small in the image because I still had the 0.85 reducer/flattener on the 100ED DS Pro so I could use the flats taken on a previous session. The ASI294MC Pro was cooled to -10°C and stacking & processing was with DSS & PI. 

So, here is M108 - Surfboard Galaxy and M97 - Owl Nebula.

[Kon]

Nicely captured. One of my favourite visual targets.

[peter shah]

great image nice to see both in the same frame