Ad Astra Observatory

The seeing was pretty bad last night, as in “wind blowing so hard that I thought the leaves rattling were raindrops and ran outside to check”.

This wreaked havoc on Veronica’s guiding. So, the stars were not perfect in any of the shots, but they were all about evenly bad, and there were SIX HOURS of them.

So I decided to stack them up anyway.

This is Sh2-155, The Cave Nebula in Cepheus. This object is way down over the house early in the evening, but I imaged for so long that the telescope hit the pier again this morning. I intended to shoot Sh2-155 for just an hour or two, then swap to IC 1848 The Soul Nebula, but the seeing was awful and I decided to stick with the object, hoping that it would get better as the night dragged on.

Sh2-155, The Cave Nebula in Cepheus

18 frames. 20 minutes each. Six hours. Wow. Oh sure, the image could be a little tighter. But you gotta love li’l P and how the photons just come flowing in.

The problems with Veronica are still bothering me, but I’m trying to put that out of my mind for now, and just enjoy imaging for awhile.