A promised night of clear, but freezing skies, offered much, but delivered relatively little - clear spells, poor transparency, and definitely cold! After weeks of cloud, I was determined to make the best of it...
M35 is jewel box of the winter sky, ~3000 LY away, comprising bright blue-white main sequence stars and a few older orange-red stars, spanning ~30LY. NGC 2158 by contrast looks tiny, but this 'puddle of gold dust' is of similar size, only 6x further away, and believed to be 2 billion years old. A treasure trove on a hard winters night.
A couple of developments made this a surprisingly enjoyable evening - firstly, I used the excellent phone App, Polarscope Align Pro [
https://astro.ecuadors.net/polar-scope-align/] to find this object on my 'push to' LX6 mount, which put me in the right place each time. I am planning to fit some encoders to use my trusty ArgoNavis [
http://www.wildcard-innovations.com.au/]. Secondly, I realise that I have not been preparing my data properly in Nebulosity for processing in Startools - specifically aligning all my images first, before stacking using sigma clip.
Captured LRGB in Envisage, reduction in Nebulosity and then straightforward Startools processing (especially the wipe function, which I have found very hard to use in the past). Hopefully this will ensure I don't end up clipping my data in an attempt to minimise gradients and other issues with sub-standard images.
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