I’ve been really lucky lately with some great clear nights, mostly during weekends. I don’t really have time to image during the week and summer nights are already short enough. Last night must have been one of the warmest nights I’ve ever seen here. Unfortunately everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

I didn’t really have a plan so I decided to radomly point the scope at the Lion Nebula to see what kind of detail I could get out of the head of the lion. It’s a magnificent region with emission, reflection, star formation and two Wolf-Rayet stars lighting the whole area on fire.

This is what went wrong:

• I had some periodic guiding issues causing my stars to be all over the place
• Trying to fix this made me lose focus a few times
• Might also have lost a bit of collimation by tinkering on the scope all the time
• Insects kept flying into the camera cooler

The result is a bit of a hot mess that I had to overprocess to make something out of it. I will definitely try this object again with proper integration time and hopefully with some better results.