I was very fortunate to be able to get out last night after a month or poor skies. Even luckier that I was able to get the old newt out the night before for an hour to view double stars before the clouds moved in.
The night was fun, but unfortunately there were some mishaps. A significant one too!
I wanted to image this M95, M96, and M105 group mainly because of its position in the sky. I haven’t seen this group imaged much on the forum. Probably because it is really not that remarkable. The group of mag 9+ galaxies are somewhat small in my
As things would have it, I had some issues. Took a bit to get the camera/focuser angled just right to include all the members of the group. The Aim function in Astrophotography Tool’s Pointcraft took me a few tries. I neglected to save the scope coordinates to return to after the flip, so I had to do some guessing to re-find the center post flip. All worked out though. The killer issue was that after I finished imaging, I noticed that the scope objective was completely fogged over! Dang!
I had the power to the homemade dew heaters at 75%. When I finished imaging, the mount was dripping wet. I need to pay better attention.
One of my goals tonight was to try shooting my Nikon D5300 at iso 200. I read a good bit on the internet about the low noise advantages. My histogram for 240 second exposures was just barely off the left margin. Interesting, but with the dew issue variable included, not sure what to make of the experiment, but it is pretty much trashed due to the dew.
I just threw all of the 45 light frames (stacked at 90% in
Processed in
Hey Bob [mention]bobharmony[/mention] I did try binning at 71% as opposed to 35% and got better results even though the sky was light gray from poor seeing. Interesting!
