I had only 1 hour of clear sky last night that quickly turned into fog. I still decided to test out some things and point the scope at the Pleiades, the most iconic star cluster in the fall sky. In the end I had to throw away most of the subs and try to work with 1 hour of questionable data.

There’s a lot of noise and some weird artifacts but it’s still cool to see the bright blue nebulosity appear around the main stars.

With Taurus up I’m hoping to image both the Crab Nebula and Jellyfish Nebula. While I wait for clear nights I’ll probably spend some time cleaning my mirror, figuring out cable management and continue to design the observatory plans.

Flashback to last year where I didn’t have a single clear night between the end of November and mid January. October has been like that, continuously cloudy and I’m worried about the rest of the fall season, considering this is one of the best periods for amateur astronomy.

Last night though we got some good conditions coming out of nowhere with clear skies from 11 PM till 4 AM.

I was not really sure what to do, I had just finished working on my mount trying to reduce backlash and I kind of hoped to test it during a night with full moon, not during perfect conditions. Additionally I had to work the next day so I couldn’t babysit the scope all night.

My first two subs were not good but luckily I discovered my balancing was off. After rebalancing I had around 20 excellent subs so I decided to go to sleep. This morning I found my scope covered in dew and frost but my asiair showed me around 115 subs so the plan worked. Unfortunately when checking the last 40 or so subs I found elongated stars. I’m not exactly sure what the root cause is, could be guiding but also balance or loss of polar alignment.

All things considered I’m very happy that I got some imaging time.

The object is NGC2403, a spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis, 8 million light-years away from us. Its structure and amount of star formation make it look at lot like M33 and if you would compare Hubble images it would be difficult to see the difference.

Not many clear nights lately. I’ve been mostly working on figuring out a future garden observatory project and listing some stuff I would like to add to my setup (better narrowband filter, autofocuser, mirror baffle, dew heater).

I’ve also started working on improving the backlash on my HEQ5 mount. Last night was a full moon so not worth really to try and image but I still wanted to see if my efforts had lead to better guiding. So here’s the core of the Heart Nebula under a full moon.