Found NGC 2903 easily tonight using the Telrad off the sickle of Leo. I actually found it easily twice, because I initially set up all gung-ho to go and started imaging without polar aligning. I couldn't figure out why my guiding performance was so terrible and was blaming it on wind gusts. Then I realized what I had done, stopped, realigned, refocused, and got much better results. CCD at 8.5 °C; I'm going to need to start using the chiller again soon. I still had a lot of trouble guiding tonight (football-shaped stars in many subs), and to top it all off started getting high clouds messing things up. I can probably do better at this, but not until the Moon and clouds go away.
In the revision, reprocessed with better color white balance.
Date: 19 Mar 2013
Subject: NGC 2903, Barred spiral galaxy in Leo
Scope: AT8IN + High Point Scientific Coma Corrector
Filter: none
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)
Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 1.14.01
Camera: DSI IIc (no chiller, T = 8.5 °C)
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.1.4, no dither
Exposure: 39 x300 s
Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack.
Processing: StarTools 1.3 Crop, Develop, HDR
ptimze, Sharp, Deconvolute, Wipe:Gradient, Develop, Track, Repair:Warp, Magic:Shrink (2x), Life:Moderate (saturate), Denoise (twice, on background). CS6 Astronomy Tools Gaussian blurred layer mask darken background, increase star color, AstroFrame.
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