M42 after guide failure!

[BlueAstra]

My first night out for weeks and PHD guiding fails! Still looking into the reasons for the RA cal failure, could be step length, cable, etc. Anyway, my rough polar alignment only afforded me about 1-2 min exposures before trails appeared, so decided to go ahead with my plan anyway, which was M42 and Mars. I also wanted to try out my new Hutech LP filter to see if it was any improvement over the SW LP filter used previously.

The first two photos are single 1 and 4 min shots of M42 to gauge the LP rejection with the Hutech. The results are below. You can see the 1 min is OK, but the 4 min is completely blown out. I can only think this is due to the almost complete snow coverage reflecting the street lights. I decided to do 10 x 1min due to the guidescope failure, so at least I would get something. I did notice the colour balance of the result with the Hutech was much better than with the SW LPF.

The third photo is the result of DSS and some curve manipulation in PS, and I'm quite pleased with the result seeing as it was only 10x1m with an unmodded camera! Gutted I wasn't able to try some longer exposures now. The Hutech LPF also seemed to perform well. Mmmm, the camera mod is starting to look attractive. After that I packed away the camera and got out the Neximage for Mars.

PS. It was ***** cold too!

[Taff]

Hi' The last image of the neb have nice coloures there' nice one.Mark