The good of this picture was that the skies were the best I've ever seen. Spruce Knob in WV is a true dark site and after years of attending the party, there was finally a set of incredible nights. Transparency was pretty poor, seeing was mediocre, but it was inky black in the sky. As I always suggest, when attending dark sites and you have a little bit of time, go after faint rgb targets. Well, 5 nights of imaging in one week will let you acquire some good data. The ha for this was acquired a little earlier, one night of data from my local dark site which seemed downright littered with lp, compared to AHSP, and the rest from Spruce Knob.

I attempted my dual scope setup and while the software all went swimmingly well, the mechanics of the system didn't. I couldn't get the scopes to share the same fov and after a few nights of trying that, I gave up and decided I'm going to machine myself some figure 8 rings for a top bottom setup... More to come on that in another post. Also, I replaced the rack and pinion assembly on my WO Star71 and I totally screwed something up. The camera's drawtube now seems to have a good bit of play in it and I got it better over the next couple of days, but it isn't fixed. The play in the drawtube is causing tilt which is causing bad stars. I was able to get a couple of decent frames of stars when pointing close to straight up that helped make a good lum mask to recover them as well as I could hope, but that's another work in progress. So, basically I screwed everything in my super stable setup up this weekend and have a good bit of work ahead of me.

On the bright side, I really like this target and I'm quite pleased with the results. I have a darker version as well, but I like the dust showing up every where in this one. Much like the last project on VDB 152, the Ha frames and the resultant bands really seemed to set this image off. I'm sure I will reprocess, but I'll wait for you fine folks to give me some pointers to get this image in top shape. As always, C&C's are very much appreciated and thanks for looking!!