Nevay Observation

• Likely last clear night for a while so in on Sunday
• 18:30: coolers on (c1c:2 - -15:-20), dome open fan on with door open to cool dome down.
• Both coolers around 75% power.
• Clear sky, visibility good - twinkle below 30 deg alt.
• Sunset at 8pm, aligned to Sirius by 20:20
• Spent some time focussing both telescopes - the main telescope definitely needs realignement.

• Recorded camera 1 cool down in 3 minute intervals for 1hr to show cooling ring.

Targets

• Moon
• Orion
• Heart Nebula
• Elephant's Trunk Nebula
• Wizard Nebula
• Saturn
• Pin Wheel Galaxy narrow field LRGB

Moon

• Few images of the moon using the widefield scope
• Sky was still blueish and moon blinding - used H Alpha filter to reduce
• 3 images of the moon

Orion

• Touched up focus of widefield scope after shooting moon
• Composed shot of orion
• Guiding ok on star near core - main scope and wide field not aligned with each other
• Record luminance filter, 10s, 30s and 120s in sequence x5
• Not really sure of the best result until post processing so record a few and maybe even HDR combine.
• Aerial in way - break for 10 mins
• Back on - 21:20
• 21:40 - H Alpha images
• 120s shows some nice structure, but can easily go higher without saturating on stars
• 400s Ha exposure.
• 400s slightly saturated in core, but lovely detail in wings.
• Settled on 240s - repeating 5x
• 22:07 - on to heart

Heart

• Difficult because of declination
• Had to rotate camera on main scope
• Had to pull cables out a little more as not enough length
• Drove scope all the way round so as time progresses, cables will loosen not tighten
• Can't use stellatrium to position!
• Not quite aligned
• http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/1567445#annotated
• 1800s Ha exposures and 120s L
• 00:00 1x of each done, on 2nd 1800s.
• Pretty cold - camera 2 cooler at -20C and only 50% power - could run harder, but wouldn't have calibration set and likely can't get one in daylight ours so stick to -20C.
• Upped RA guiding agressiveness from 2 to 3 as it was wandering a bit.
• 01:08 1800s exposures continue.

Elephant's Trunk

• Moved manually as can't use stellarium as it'll loop round in RA
• Aligned ok
• http://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/1567647#annotated
• Not shown in stellarium or clearly in astrometry so took a few tries to get in the right place
• 10 min Ha showed up something and then realigned using the stars in both the Ha and L images.
• It's roughly a ring but the 'trunk' is on one side so although I was aligned to the ring perfectly, I offset it to get more of the trunk in field of view.
• 4x Ha at 30min, 9x L at 120s. In 4th Ha at 4:44
• Decided to stick with this target rather than trying any others to get as many sub frames as possible to beat the noise.

Flats

• Lastly 60 flats as focussed was changed.
• 5:52.

-- LaurieNevay - 02 Apr 2017