These days it seems rare I get to do a new object, but this is a new one for me. It took me a while to find this object because I just couldn't match up asterisms, and the galaxy itself has a bright core but looks more like a fuzzy star than a galaxy at 1 s exposures in the imager. But once I finally found it, it is visible at 1.5 s in the finder and at 1 s in the guider. There is another faint fuzzy at the west end of my field of view that is not in my Astroplanner catalog. I'll probably reframe the shot to get it too. We had record heat today and that is showing up tonight; with the chiller at 7 V, I'm still at 16 °C starting out tonight. I've also got a very strong N drift; perhaps I picked a star other than Polaris when I was polar aligning and messed it up big time. Nevertheless, and despite some light breeze, things seem to be going OK so I'm going to run with it. Performed a meridian flip around midnight and checked the polar alignment at the same time. It was indeed way off. Found the target a lot more easily this time, since I knew what to look for. I'm having guiding errors and the wind has picked up.
Date: 13 May 2013
Subject: NGC 4725, Ring Galaxy in Coma Berenices
Scope: AT8IN + HPS Coma Corrector
Filter: None
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors)
Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 1.14.2
Camera: DSI IIc (chiller at ~1.7 A, T = 16.0 °C)
Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.1.5, no dither
Exposure: 35x300 s
Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack.
Processing: StarTools 1.3 Crop; Wipe:Color & Brightness; Develop 98.12%; Contrast; HDR
ptimize; Sharpen; Deconvolute: 2.7 pix; Track; Color:Bottom 2.0, Top Full, Sat 650%; Magic:Shrink 1; Denoise; Life:Moderate. CS6+Astronomy Tools increase star color; deep space noise reduction; space noise reduction; layer mask unsharp mask for dust lanes; less crunchy more fuzzy; AstroFrame.
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