My prior efforts on the Nautilus were less than satisfactory. I'm not sure these will be much better; this big galaxy is pretty far away and hence it looks small and not terribly bright. I had significant guiding issues as well, which improved as I played with the balance. However, another part of this session was a huge success: I finally got Astrotortilla working, and it is awesome! Specifically, I imaged up to the meridian after finding the object in my typical way, synching the PicGoto on β Ari and doing a successful goto. After doing my meridian flip, the scope was at an awkward angle where I had trouble getting my old back contorted to be able to aim accurately through the Telrad sight. I had been successfully plate solving on some saved test images, so I decided to try using Astrotortilla to synch. At first I let it move the mount too, and that was fouled up because it obviously didn't know which side of the meridian the mount was on, so I settled on just using it to synch the mount through ASCOM, then selecting my target and doing the goto through the Cartes du Ciel program's interface. That worked marvelously. So no longer do I even need to find and synch on a bright star; I can just let Astrotortilla do its thing. And it is FREE! AMAZING! The image itself is still less than satisfactory. I’ll try being a bit more selective in which subs I keep and see if I can’t do a bit better. I do see traces of an outer arm or star stream to the left of the core

Date: 23 Oct 2014

Subject: NGC 772, Nautilus Galaxy

Scope: AT8IN

Filter: Baader Fringe Killer

Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado)

Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.3.1k (Win 7 ASCOM)

Camera: DSI IIc chiller at 2.50 A, 5-7 °C

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither

Exposure: 32x480 s

Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included+flats, normalize, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack.

Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.289 Crop; Wipe 80%; Develop 82%; HDR:Equalize; Contrast; Life:Moderate; Color:Scientific 299%; Track 9.9 pix, smoothness 80%; Magic 1 pix. Photoshop CC 2014 + Carboni Astronomy Tools Deep space noise reduction; Levels (layer masked); Increase star color; Astroframe.