The New Year with Clear Skies!

After many weeks of poor weather conditions, here are my latest imaging efforts to start off the new year. M74 (The Phantom), NGC 891, M109, M82 (Cigar Galaxy) and M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) All images were captured early Jan. 1st 2009

Conditions: 28F Clear, Fair Seeing and Transparency with 10-20mph Wind

Equipment and Software:

10” Reflector
60mm Refractor
Atlas EG-Q
DSIc
SPC900NC
EQMOD
PHD
Toshiba Satellite
PSE 2.0*PixInsight LE*Registax4

M74

1x660s + 3x480s=39min.

NGC 891

7x240s=28min.

M109

5x240s=20min.

M82

6x240s=24min.

M51

5x240s=20min.

Autoguiding Finally!

Here are a couple of my first Autoguided images. M57 taken a few nights ago was mostly an attempt to figure out the PHD software. The image is 10x60sec. subs. and star trails were caused by the lack of good balancing and I eventually had to add another 7lb. counterweight. M74 was captured last night and it consist of 4x120sec subs. I did a better job at balancing and polar alignment this time. I captured second image of M74 but it consisted of 30x120sec. subs and for some reason the image did not turn out, it looked like I adjusted the brightness down to about 3%..?? Hopefully on my next session I’ll be able to take longer subs and get more data.

Faint Fuzzies

Here are a few unguided images of Galaxy M74, NGC 772 and NGC 891. All were 20x30 sec. Subs. Post processed with PSE 2.0 and NEAT