This was an ambitious and fun little experiment form my backyard here in Australia. The target barely reaches 20deg above the horizon, and I only get ~3 hours of it above my northern tree line. To say that this is a success would be understating how absolutely pleased I am with this result.
This success was not without a few challenges though.
- I had a gear issue where the focus motor on the moonlite focuser was in a harrowing position and a little too close to the pier for comfort when pointed at the Zenith, so my framing changed (or was forced to change) several times between my imaging sessions. I've sinced fixed this by adding a spacer to my threaded connections so I can always keep the focus motor pointed up.
- I lost a full nights data to a dodgy DC plug coming loose and losing my dew heaters sometime during the night.
- I was shooting into biggest light dome for this target
- losing countless subs to wandering clouds/poor SNR
A nice little surprise when it came to processing was seeing the soap bubble very readily present in both the OIII and Ha data.
If the opportunity arises, I definitely want to image this again, with slightly different framing, and somewhere around 3x the integration on the OIII.
Thanks for looking and Clear Skies!
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