I’ve been trying to fix my mount issues with mixed success. The huge errors in the RA axis have disappeared but have now been replaced with some smaller issues on the DEC axis. This is entirely my fault for being a bit too curious about the inner workings of my equatorial mount and tinkering with all the gears and bolts.

It doesn’t really matter really at this moment because the only (more or less) clear night we had this month was last sunday under a full moon. We had other brief moments of clarity this month but I used those to start my journey in the rabbit hole of exoplanet transit capturing – something I want to devote more time to in the future.

The main galaxy in this image is peculiar galaxy ARP214, located about 52 million light years away. Its weird shape is caused by gravitational interaction with the smaller galaxy on the left (NGC3729).

Barely visible, under ARP214, sits the galaxy group ARP322. These weird shaped dots are interacting galaxies located 370 million light years away. This is 8 hours of total integration time but as said before, the moonlight really created a layer of noise that was hard to get rid off.