First light for a bunch of things, but primarily for the PicGoto Simplificado. I"m delighted to report that the goto capability works well. I picked this target precisely because it is has been hard for me to find with a Telrad in the past because there are no nearby bright stars. There was enough Moon that its light also made things more difficult. In addition, the only prior image I have of this galaxy was taken with my Meade 4501. So I synced the PicGoto on Omicron UMa, then executed a goto, and I had NGC 2403 in the field of view of my DSI II. Many clouds interfered with this image, causing a lot of subframes to be lost. I did a series of 300 s images and lost the guide star and the target due to clouds; then I restarted taking 480 s subframes. Other things that were first light: use of Cartes du Ciel (Windows) to find the targets, use of PHD2 (Windows) with ASCOM pulse guiding, and split use of Nebulosity (Mac) with VMWare for the other stuff. Overall, I’m quite happy; I just forgot to take the 0.5x reducer off my camera so this could have been imaged at a larger scale.

Date: 7 Mar 2014

Subject: NGC 2403, spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis

Scope: AT8IN + High Point Scientific Coma Corrector + 0.5x Antares telereducer (oops!)

Filter: UHC-S

Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors) + PicGoto Simplificado + Cartes du Ciel

Guiding: 9x50 Finder/Guider + DSI Ic + PHD 2.2.1 (Win ASCOM)

Camera: DSI IIc (no chiller, T = 5.5-3 °C)

Acquisition: Nebulosity 3.2.0, no dither

Exposure: 8 x 300 s + 14 x 480 s

Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack 300 s and 480 s separately, then average stack the two.

Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.279 Crop; Wipe (dark anomaly off); Develop 87.49%; HDRptimze, Sharp, Deconvolute 1.5; Color:Scientific 200%; Life:Moderate; Track:Read Noise 43%; Magic:Shrink 1; Magic: Shrink Core 1. CS6 Astronomy Tools increase star color, Levels (darken), AstroFrame.