Ad Astra Observatory

This was from the final day of shooting before I figured out the configuration for the mount setup (first, connect as LX-200 and set the serial port with arrow keys, not the drop-down. Then set the mount up in POTH, and it “just worked”. I had to delete the port in Device Manager first, so it could re-home off of COM1. Have I mentioned that I hate Windows?). The upshot was that guiding wasn’t working, so this is 5m subframes.

I only shot half an hour or so, before I decided to hop over to NGC 2174, trying to get more photons on an object that doesn’t get a lot of press.

I really want to get a deep shot of M42 at some point — I have so much source material that I should have hours and hours and hours of data. I’ll have to dig around and see if I have any Ha, and anything with subframes longer than 5m.

I decided to stretch it nice and hard, to get as much outer nebulosity as I could. I like that the edges of the bubble are dusty brown, instead of lurid pink.

Here is a full-resolution crop of the nebula (well, I cropped 1500×1000 out of the center, then resized that to 900×600, my normal crop).