"Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising through the mellow shade, glitter like a swarm of
fire-flies tangled in a silver braid" according to Alfred Lord Tennyson 1835. For me this swarm, charging ahead of the bull, signifies the onset of winter. The Pleiades lying 440 LY from earth, are passing through an intergalactic dust moving at a relative speed of ~18km/s. The hot young blue (B-type) stars reflecting in the dust cloud. In ~250m years this glorious open cluster will dissipate, leaving the reflective dust far behind. The nebulosity was discovered in 1859 by the German astronomer Ernst Tempel, using a 4-inch (10cm) telescope, who described it as “a faint stain like a breath on a mirror” - my short integration resembles this. The passing dust cloud is far more extensive, and better shown in a previous
image from 2020.
Making use of a very short window, in between cloud, I managed just under an hour of data. I've now got my portable 'goto' set up down to a fine art - taking approximately 10 minutes from carrying it outside to starting the image run - I would barely have attached all the cables, PC and power to my SCT in this time! Running off a small 3A portable battery, the RPi4 consumes very little power, and EKOS makes, solving, focusing, guiding, sequencing, and capture, a cinch. I'm surprised how well I can focus this manual zoom lens by hand - tiny increments using the focus module to check changes in HFD.
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