I was feverishly waiting for the new driver of the ASIAIR Pro to get it to work together with the Canon EOS Ra.

For that purpose I applied to the beta testing program of Apple.

Once done, I could try the Canon EOS Ra for the first time on a "bright" target ( I already tried 6 hours on the Iris Nebula, but in Bortle 8 sky, nothing really good came out of it...).

I had a few unexpected problems during the night, that started around 22h45 :

- around 1h, I woke up to check how it was going on : I noticed very dark and very small dust spots on the last images, therefore on the sensor itself. I unscrewed the DSLR body to gently blow air on the sensor and put it back. Once done, I just noticed I just screwed the possibility to make flats for the first part of the night... (there is a little play when connecting the DSLR body, and I could see the tip of the OAG's prism was in a slightly different position...).

- around 3h I woke up again because I knew the batteries would not last the whole night : I was right. The RC8 was in home position (this is how I configured the ASIAIR when it cannot shoot : he tells the mount to stop tracking and go to home position). I changed the batteries, asked the ASIAIR Pro to target the last image center (there is button that platesolve the current view and ask the mount to GoTo this position). By changing the batteries, I again rotated the DSLR by mistake (it was not screwed tight).

Since then, I ordered the Canon dummy battery that is pluged to an AC-DC converter, in order not to lose any minute of useful clear sky.... (ordered at BH Video and Photo in New York because I couldn't find it anywhere in Europe....)

Then the process took a bit of time due to another mistake : I was a bit in bad mood in the morning - short night does that... - and knowing I had screwed a few times my subs to be able to flat-correct them, I just took the flats without much considerations (no darks for them, just sky flats...).

And the sun rising, I just burnt half of them : blue was clipping at the center, but didn't noticed after I cleaned up everything.

So they over-corrected outrageously my subs, and I had - channel by channel - to adjust my flats in order to have something that works. Except for the tip of the OAG prism of course. For the blue channel, I even had to use another channel to replace part of the background, using star masks and MMT tools in Pixinsight.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg, but I will post the raw master light just to show the post processing work on this one...

CONCLUSION : special care should always be given in the data acquisition phase :-) !!!