Ad Astra Observatory

I was able to get an hour of M16 tonight, and it was earlier in the night, so the dew/temperature (causing focus shift) wasn’t as bad. It’s still quite a strange object from a post-processing standpoint — large variations in brightness, trying to bring out nebulosity and dark dust lanes all at once. I think that I’ll have a field day with this data once I have some more processing mojo under my belt.

Side note: I hadn’t moved the camera between nights, so I figured I might be able to use the 11 frames from last night to extend the integration time a bit. No dice. The two shots were on opposite sides of a meridian flip, so they were 180° rotated relative to each other, and the camera is not quite orthogonal with the RA/Dec axes, so it’s not *exactly* 180°, …

If I get my hands on some software that can do some serious de-rotation at the same time as stacking, I may be golden. Store it away.