Ad Astra Observatory

I decided to go after The Owl Nebula, as I’ve only gotten one shot of it previously, despite years of hunting in Ursa Major. So I caught half an hour of it, then decided it was getting too high in the sky (did I mention that I am loving this thing of leaving the dome pointing east?), and dropped down to another target that was still rising, M106.

The thing is, if I’d started on M106, I could have had two hours of exposures, where instead I have some M97 that I’m never going to process, and only 1h20m of M106. grumble.

I resolve that I shall not even bother with 5m subframes, unless I’m testing something, from now on.

Here’s M106, for which I will always have a soft spot, as I found it by filtering target lists, as opposed to seeing lots of photos of it or its “cool nickname”.

Came out notta too bad, if I do say so myself. I need to spend some time figuring out how to build “white balance” into my workflow. There’s a whole G2V star thing that I don’t want to bother with, but I will get there.