Ad Astra Observatory

With the newly-tuned mount, I decided to try Pumpkin on some more unguided imaging. After the “baseline” from the previous night, I now wanted to see what this MFWB could really do.

M42 was a bit far west and covered with clouds by the time I got Pumpkin up and running (I had a pretty funny motor stall that wigged me out momentarily — in my haste to get imaging after testing Trixie, I had forgotten to swap out the counterweights, so 10# Pumpkin was offsetting 43# of counterweight… oops), so I decided to see if I could work The Rosette for a bit instead.

This time, I centered the cluster that I could see in the finder. This proved to be a good decision:

That’s 12 five min subframes, one hour of integration time. Rosette, you are mine.

I picked up some wispy outer nebulosity, too, that is easier to see in inverse:

Still a bit noisy. I’d like to apply a full calibration set on this, and have about 3 hours of integration time to work with.

This was shot under an 8-day moon.

The image is unguided.