Ad Astra Observatory

I mounted up Pumpkin by herself tonight. The mount’s been having a problem with guiding, very rough behavior in RA. I’m going to be tuning the mount up tomorrow, but the sky was clear, so I decided to see if it behaved a little better with just one tiny little scope onboard.

Because I also don’t have an OAG at the moment (I’m picking it up tomorrow), this was an unguided test.

I started out, as is normal, with a shot at M42. The pointing model was a little rough, so the nebula is off-center. The mount was so far west by this point (and the clouds were rolling in and out so much) that I only got 2 frames of M42, so this is a fairly noisy 10min integration:

To emphasize some of the wispy nebular detail, I inverted the photo, also:

…nice. I do like these Astronomik Ha filters. This is with the clip-in.

Once M42 was too far west, I switched to The Rosette. I need to learn the star patterns around this object, because I thought I could see the star cluster off to the right in the finder scope, but I wasn’t sure, so…

Yep, another swing-and-a-miss. The Rosette is quickly taking on the Nemesis status that The North America Nebula had for so long. Flashes of brilliance on a cool looking nebula, but a lot of near misses. Oh well. This is a 30min integration.

Aww, how cute! Pumpkin as the “main imaging scope”:

The unguided behavior is better than things have been recently. But I’m looking forward to seeing whether the MFWB helps this any.