This small but sturdy travel rig performed quite well on this lengthy trip to west central New Mexico a week ago.  Yes, I know that this is Monsoon season in those parts, but I was left with little choice considering that I drove to meet the family on vacation in Colorado and linked this trip on the backside to that schedule.  Impractical to have done it prior to Colorado because of the moon phase.  In any case, with 7 days in NM, I got 2 fully clear nights.  So it could have been worse!

Next year, I will be sure not to conflict any trips with the Oregon Star Party!  I would have gotten a lot more data and driven many fewer miles!

I have already discussed the setup in previous posts.  See:

Sh2-101 (Tulip Nebula) to NGC 6883. A First Light Project on a Travel Rig
and 


NGC 6914 and Relatively Widefield Neighborhood. 2nd Light with Travel Setup.
for descriptions of the setup.

This included a full-on, "real" conditions, test of the EGO battery power pack I built.  I can confirm that it worked perfectly, without a hitch.  I look forward to testing this on my full-sized rigs!



This is not the first image I captured in NM.  Just the first that I processed, since it appeared to be decent data and it was just a single panel image.  The AM5, WO61mm and ASI071MC pro work well together.  Solid as a rock!  Guiding is basically zeroes throughout the session.  Undersampling probably greatly helps with this.  Given that issue, dithering and processing at 2X drizzle works wonders with the data.  Given that modest aperature that I am working with, I am quite pleased with the detail, contrast and colors I am able to develop with relatively short exposures and modest integration times.  No autofocus on this rig (yet) and considering that I hardly had to focus it upon setup, on site, and after a week of driving and moving the parts around, including removing the camera/filterslider/spacing rings/rotator. I doubt that I will ever put an autofocuser on this.  However, I am noticing that I had some very slight issues with either tilt or backspacing.  Given the sketchy weather forecast, I did not bother with trying to resolve this issue.  I let BXT correct this, which it did almost perfectly. 

I was at latitude 33N at my site in NM.  Transparency was of course stunning in the Bortle 1 skies.  Seeing was probably fair.  But again, undersampling worked in my favor.  I just need to keep not pixel peeping with these images.  This image is not intended to be a "Pillars of Creation" composition, though I have to say, they look fine considering.  Personally, I am most happy with M17 and the overall composition given it is au naturale.