Another very easy goto from Arcturus. The slow slew speeds of the PicGoto are not bothering me because I do most of my "slewing" by releasing the clutches and manually moving the scope to a visible star near my target, then syncing. I have too much moonlight tonight to do anything other than a bright target like this or do lunar/planetary, which I'm not in the mood for tonight. I took some pains to set the exposure short enough that I did not blow out the core, and had to drop all the way down to 30 sec. I determined this by taking "frame and focus" shots and noting the pixel values in the core. Even at 60 sec, the sensor was fully saturated, but at 30 sec I could still resolve the core stars. So this meant I took a whopping 300 subframes. I used them all (I was too lazy to manually sort through 300 of them); perhaps later I'll reprocess these data and do some quality analysis on the subframes. This is far better than my earlier image of this target, which was taken back in 2012 with my old Meade 4501 scope. I guess I've learned a few tricks in the last couple of years. It doesn't come close to comparing with Matt McBee's recent image of this same target, but I'm happy with it nonetheless.

Date: 13 Mar 2014

Subject: M3 globular cluster

Scope: AT8IN + 0.5x Antares telereducer

Filter: none

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: 300 x 30 s

Stacking: Neb 3, bad pixel map, bias included, normalize first, trans+rot align, 1.5 SD stack

Processing: StarTools 1.3.5.279 Crop; Wipe 75%; Develop 92.2%; Color:Scientific 199%; HDR:Reveal core; Sharpen; Deconvolute 1.5; Life:Moderate; Track:Read Noise 4.66%%. CS6 Astronomy Tools increase star color; healing brush & clone stamp to take out a dust bunny; saturation -30; AstroFrame.