The Moon is bright again so I'm returning to Hα imaging. I decided to try the switch to the ST80 scope "cold turkey": I just moved the finder/guider onto the ST80 and didn't even bother to take the Telrad sight off my AT8IN reflector. The plan was to rely on Astrotortilla to find the target. It didn't work at first, until I realized I was setting Astrotortilla to the field of view of the AT8IN, not the ST80. It's a little challenging with the Hα filter in place (because that cuts down the number of stars drastically), and to top it off, my Peltier cooler failed big time last night so the CCD temperature got up into the 40's before I realized something was wrong and there were numerous hot pixels masquerading as stars. Fortunately the weather has turned cold, so the CCD was down below 5 °C once I really got the session rolling. Eventually, I did get plate solving to work, though the California Nebula is quite easy to find from ε Per; the thing is HUGE! I shot 2 sections of a mosaic, but *!#*! Windows decided to shut itself down for updating in the middle of the second session. So much for staying up half the night to perform a meridian flip.

Date: 3-4 Nov, 2014

Subject: NGC 1499, California Nebula

Scope: Orion ST80 + Antares 0.5x telereducer

Filter: Baader Hα

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

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

Camera: DSI IIc no cooling

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.1, no dither

Exposure: 22+9x600 s (2 panels)

Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, flats, OSC extract R, normalize, square, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack resize 2x.

Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.289 Crop; Develop 50%; HDRptimize; Life:Less=More; Deconvolute: 3.0 pix; Track 5.0 pix; Magic 1 pix. Photoshop CC 2014 + Carboni Astronomy Tools Layer mask align & combine; Levels to match backgrounds; Hα false color black background in one panel; Astroframe.