It's been about three months since my last imaging post; we've had no useable weather at all for most of the fall except one clear week in November for which my camera quit working. So bad luck all around. First, I have to say that Altair replaced my 269C without any complaint once I ran some diagnostic tests for them and Land, Sea, & Sky (the Altair dealer here in the US) handled the replacement transaction and the shipping back and forth to the UK for me. It's never fun for us to have equipment problems, but they both did get me back up and running with a minimum of frustration.

Perhaps by fate, the replacement camera arrived at noon on Friday and we had a three hour window at dusk without clouds for the first time in well over a month. I wouldn't say conditions were good: temperature was around -7C (~20F) and the transparency (water vapor) in the atmosphere had to be about as bad as I've ever seen; everything had a haze to it like looking through the shower door. The combination of the poor transparency and probably also the snow on the ground here amplified the light pollution too. I measured 17.2 SQM mag/sec2 at zenith, which is the worst I've ever measured (not that I ever get very good values).

Terrible conditions all around, but I really wanted to try the new camera out, so I forced myself out into the cold, fought some cable issues in the cold and snow, and eventually got everything working. I decided to take some quick, un-guided images on Pleiades, which I couldn't even really see in the poor sky conditions, but somehow the GoTo found it. My expectations of the images were fairly low given the conditions, so I didn't bother with any calibrations; however, this morning I find I am quite surprised at how much of the surrounding reflection nebula is visible. So I wanted to post it since I'm pretty amazed that I got anything useable.

As Altair was good enough to replace my non-working camera for me and I have realized I need a back-up plan, I have a new 26C arriving Tuesday (the IMX571 chip)! That will become my primary camera and the 269C will be a backup. Hopefully it won't be three months before I can get out and try it...