A run of clear nights last week, albeit with a waxing moon, gave me opportunity to take some images and fine tune my portable setup. Centre stage NGC 6205 (Messier 13) shining brightly at 22 kLY and 100,000 LY in diameter. Much further away the lovely spiral NGC 6207 at 30 mLY. 

After a night of poor tracking, which I put down to excessive weight - total 6.3kg on my 5kg max load SA2i mount, I managed to shed 0.5kg by using a smaller stepper motor, and removing an extra counterweight - no change?

I 'tracked' down the problem to loss of power. I had been supplying my RPi4 and stepper motor HAT with 12v, which powers the RPi4 board with an inbuilt 5v inverter. Stepper motors require power to hold their position, and it was clear this was drawing too much current, resulting in loss of power to the mount. I use a 240v to 12v 5A inverter, the RPi4 requires 3A, and the stepper motor 1A. The solution, power the Waveshare HAT and RPi4 separately - solved!

I managed an hour and 15 of data at 3m exposures to produce this wider field at an imaging scale of 0.9 arcseconds/px. Nights are short with nautical darkness ending around 02:45am. 

Captured using Stellarmate (EKOS) the data were calibrated in Nebulosity, and processed in Siril. The original using deconvolution and a little sharpening in Siril, Rev B transferred to a new AI tool Astrosharp, very similar to the PI add on BlurXterminator.  Rev C is the best 60% frames pre-processed in ASTAP and processed in Siril, with deconvolution. 

No doubt these AI tools make a difference to our images, but I’m not sure what I feel about their widespread use, and in the broader context, the unregulated development of this tech. No doubt harmless in Astroimaging, apart from skewing more towards art than science, but I do precious little science in my astroimaging.

In the wider application it is interesting, even frightening,  that many of our leading AI engineers are talking more about governance, regulation and even an ethical code for their development. Sky net draws ever closer…

In the meantime, focus on the natural (and unnatural) beauty of these DSOs and enjoy your novalunosis.