Ad Astra Observatory

Last night, I mistakenly ran without a light-pollution filter, and that really threw off the white balance. With a quick run back through focusing &c, the trusty (and only somewhat dusty) IDAS-LPS is back in the imaging train!

Compared to a year ago, when I was just getting started with the observatory, the mount is running a lot more smoothly now. I have gotten used to being able to just rip down 20min subframes all night long. Pumpkin is always fairly easy to deal with, anyway, but I was really happy to see the guiding run so easily for the past two nights! The guiding (adjusting once every 3 sec) stayed under 1″ the whole time.

I am still working on my processing workflow; I can’t seem to get a really solid white balance from shot to shot. But I’m pretty happy with this 2-hour run of The North America and Pelican Nebulae.

I hope that I can catch more of the large summer nebulae, before they go too far west. I captured a couple frames of M31 last night, without the IDAS-LPS. Sigh. More wasted pixels 🙂