Finally the weather has changed and there are a few reasonable nights ahead to start my summer project.
Last night was a bit truncated with cloud starting to come in around 2am but I at least go my rig setup and working nicely
This month’s target is NGC 6960, the Witch’s Broom nebula. The plan is to leave the rig setup for at least the next four days and (hopefully) start imaging as soon as it’s dark enough.
The plan is to capture NGC 6960 as a two frame mosaic, but with the top half framed nicely so if all else fails I’ll have a nice shot anyway (since my previous attempts at mosaics has been less than stellar). To test the setup last night I managed to get around 1 hour with of goodish data, so 30 minutes pre integrated frame (nowhere near enough data).
The New Garden
The new garden is a lot smaller that the last one and has two trees in it. I’m still in the ‘getting to know you’ phase of working out where is best in the garden for certain shots and I think I’m going to be moving the scope about a lot more to take specific shot of targets than at our previous house. On the plus side the garden is further away from the street lights 🙂
Given that the south is more obscured that the last garden I’ve been thinking of running two scopes per target too get extra data/time on targets whilst they are visible but of course that comes with quite a cost.