Lots of things getting in the way of imaging this month. The weather has been particularly unfavorable with very few opportunities to image between full moons. I replaced my observatory computer this month as the old PC was giving up the ghost and the cold weather was the final nail in it's coffin. I have also replaced the guide scope. The SBIG Sti was a little long in the tooth and the camera image quality was degraded leading to poor guiding. The new ZWO scope and camera seem to be doubling guide accuracy down to about 2 arc seconds. This is evident in the higher percentage of frames that I don't reject due to poor eccentricity with the Subframe Selector script. Lastly I added a ZWO Autofocusser. I was getting frustrated with loosing focus an hour or so after I went to sleep. I now have a focus line in each imaging script after every hour or 2 of imaging. I can't yet run the script based on temperature change but I'm sure Ivo is working on it
Orion is a great subject to test new equipment out on even if it is a little passe'. It's nice and bright and rises above my local trees right at astonomical twilight. I have imaged Orion many times begining with this shot in 2015.
https://astrob.in/151194/F/ which I remember being super pleased with. I'm very happy with what I was able to do with this image. It puts all my previous efforts firmly in their place.
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