More Galaxies
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 9:51AM It was really clear at first last night with no Moon - stars everywhere! I started a galaxy run starting at RA 4h with the sidereal time being about 2h - I now sychronise on a bright star near the beginning of a run and then map 6 stars nearby. This gives me sufficient pointing accuracy to get the scripted galaxies onto the field of view. I realised after a while that images were reducing in quality and went out to find cloud moving in. I managed to image 96 galaxies before the cloud cover became total and checked all of these for supernovae - none there. As the galaxy run was taking place I was trying to set up my Canon DSLR with the CGEM mount and Meade 4" refractor - using remote software to take 30s images of the Orion Nebula region. Clearly my polar alignment was not good so that needs to be resolved. Next opportunity I am going to try some software that allows me to use the DSLR for polar alignment to save having to swap back and forth with an illuminated reticle eyepiece that I normally use.
