ASI585MC - 25 March 2024

[Fir Chlis]

Two nights on the trot! A rare treat for me.

Polar alignment went pretty well tonight, after a hiccup at the start. I’ve been starting at the home position, then going to 90deg left or right, and I must have gone too far, so EQMOD hit a mount limit and parked the mount. I had to go back and manually set back to the home position. Then I tried (and will do so in the future) putting the mount 45deg left before starting the polar align, so there’s little chance now of it hitting limits.

As usual, I’d done a t-shirt flat before sundown and a dark at the start of the evening, and another one later when the temperature dropped. First hour or so was doing some testing, then I had a pop at M81 – always a nice sight and a bit of a warm-up, useful to check that things are all behaving as expected.

I’d had a poor attempt at Pons-Brooks last night, so had another go tonight and what a difference. Previous views have always been a rather dim fuzzy green blob. This was in another league. Very dramatic.

I continued with a couple of nebulae. The small but pretty C2 Bow-tie Nebula, and C46, Hubble’s Variable Nebula, looking in this orientation like a dove of peace symbol.

Next were a couple of targets I picked at random from Stellarium, having set the angular size filter to display only items that would fit in my FoV, without being too small. First the galaxy NGC1023 and then NGC1333. This last one looks worth a revisit when the moon has gone away.

Geoff

[PeterC65]

I particularly like the snapshot of Pons-Brooks. Unfortunately it's behind a hill for me after dark. Not that I've been able to get out observing recently!