The Challenge: One Full Moon. One Night. Five Fours of "darkness. Image Five DSOs

[powerlord]

The Challenge: One Full Moon. One Night. Five Fours of "darkness. Image Five DSOs

So.. suddenly 5 solid hours of darkness as winter rolls in. And I'm not going to get a full moon spoil it. As long as you are shooting NB, I've found it makes little difference that the moon is out providing your not shooting a target right next to it.

So I set myself this sort of mental goal - setup a plan in ASIAIR to try and image 5 DSOs. And hour each.

My plan was:

NGC7023 Iris    3x600 H, 3x600 O

NGC7635 Bubble  3x600 H, 3x600 O

IC1396 Trunk    3x600 H, 3x600 O

M81    Bodes    3x300 R, 3x300 G, 3x300 B, 3x300 H, 3x180L

NGC896 Heart    3x600 H, 3x600 O

I checked my targets were all visible all night. but, in hindsight I should have had M81 first in the plan...by the time it came around the mooon dominated the sky.

So.. things started well - I spend a while getting the balance as right as possible on the kit: EQ6R-pro, C935 + 6.3 reducer, asi1600 (cooled to -20), 8 position filter wheel fully loaded, EAF, 50mm guider with asi120mc and asiair pro.

I set up at 8pm, for an 8.30/9 start.

PAed down to about 0.2' and kicked it all off, with autofocus on filter changes and MFs set to auto

Once on Iris, I watched the autofocus work nicely and start shooting. I was getting the best guiding I'd seen (which continued all night) of about 0.3" rms and the images started to come in.

I had manually set some coordinates for the Trunk, so wanted to check they were right. When it moved to that target there were off a bit, so in to Safari (connected to scope), and an adjustment to position, back to asiair, and create new favourite with those coords, and then update my plan to have that target for trunk, and continue plan.

I then set the alarm for 03.15 so I could give it a check out then (when plan should have just finished)

At 3.15 - a check showed focus lost 😞 Seemed to have been when the H's of M81 were being done. I had a bit of a fart about from my bed trying to see what the issue had been, before eventually getting up and looking out the window to see a night sky glowing under the full moon, with the odd cloud..er.. that won't help.

Obviously one illuminated cloud had screwed the auto focus routine. I have found previously that if an autofocus fails, that's it. I have requested to ZWO that this should be fixed - if it fails it should return to the previous point surely...

Anyway it was then I realised my M81 images were not great anyway, because of course they are all wideband and I'd left taking them until the ruddy moon lit up the sky. duh!! Should have taken them at the start of the night!!

So.. I moved to Heart, did an autofocus there on H, and then unpaused the plan.

This morning, a check showed Heart H and O's all good.

Flats taken, and kick off of 10x300 darks as I didn't have 300s in my library.

So - a pretty production night. And even after 10 months in this hobby I'm still amazed I can do all this from my back garden (bortle 4/5)

These will no doubt be built on over time, but I wanted to see what was 'the art of the possible' in one night. in 5 hours, under a full moon.

And tbh - I'm more than happy with the results.  Well, maybe not so much Iris and Bodes...

With the forecast for more of the same tonight, I think I'll pick one and do it all night. However it was an interesting experiment to see what could be achieved in a single night

stu

 

[geeklee]

Nice challenge and good write up  Stu.  No point in wasting any clear skies!

Hopefully some/all of those are keepers for more data another night.

[The Lazy Astronomer]

Very nice and very ambitious! I particularly like the bubble nebula - amazed it came out that well in just 1 hour.

[powerlord]

that's the one I decided to spend last night on! - shot 60 subs at 300secs each in NB.

integrating now!

stu