So I missed
NGC 4473 and and
NGC 4477 - I'll do better next time (which will be earlier in galaxy season next year).
It is a little late in the season for me to go after this target as it disappears into the trees about three hours after crossing the
meridian, and I don't reach full astronomical dark until after it has already passed to the west side. I thought about going after M51, but I've captured that guy three times in the past 4 years, so decided to go for the Chain Thursday night.
I had some trouble with the
APT Bahtinov Aid again where it was reporting that I was in the .11 to .29 pixel range for focus, but it turned out when I zoomed in later that I wasn't even close and stars were showing donut holes in the center. I need to get that working properly, it seems my results are hit or miss, not sure what I'm doing wrong there. I did really well in my March session, but one of my two February nights was shaky. I have gotten much more consistent results out of BYEOS's baht tool over the years and just need to figure this new guy out.
By the time I got pointed at the Chain it was almost 10 PM. I realized I needed to rotate the camera to capture everything, but decided to go on as I had it rather than burn another 20 minutes slewing to a bright star to re-focus, then coming back to the target and re-framing. As it turned out I was in the trees by 12:35 AM on Friday morning. I managed to get 37 180 second subs for a total of 141 minutes of lights. Stacking was done using
DSS along with darks, flats, and bias frames. I tried to get by without the darks initially as I didn't have any that are close in temperature to my lights for the night, but
DSS picked up the hot pixels as stars and tried to align everything to them. As I was dithering the resulting stack wasn't at all useful, so I added some darks that were about 10 degrees off and got a usable stack out of that. Post processing was done using
StarTools.
After the Chain hit the trees, I switched over to M51 until it hit the trees about 90 minutes later. I haven't taken a look at that data yet.
My plan for next month is to work on the Western Veil for an entire night (or two) picking it up low in the East and following it across the
meridian until the sky starts to lighten up. Hoping for some clear moonless nights!
Bob
Hardware: Celestron C6-N w/ Advanced GTmount, Baader MK iii CC, Orion ST-80, Canon 60D (unmodded), Nikon D5300 (modded), Orion SSAG
Software: BYE, APT, PHD2, DSS, PhotoShop CC 2020, StarTools, Cartes du Ciel, AstroTortilla