Well first amount of clear skies for couple of weeks is on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning ...

And weren't that clear

Started set up at 10:00 few problems got going at 11:45 , most HA targets now behind house

Clouds start appearing ....

Snooze till 3:30 when clouds supposed to clear and they have ! available narrow band targets owl nebula and cats eye

Try for the owl which is directly overhead terrible guiding problems so switch to cats eye ... guiding better

Managed to grab two hours before sky began to brighten

Wrong scope for this target as focal length too short really, defraction spikes on the core as so bright but managed to get a bit of the nebulosity. Though I had some RGB of the core from ages ago but turned out to be the blinking nebula lol so couldn't combine

Here it is anyway. Merry Xmas Astrobinners !

Wiki tells us ....

NGC 6543 is a high northern declination deep-sky object. It has the combined magnitude of 8.1, with high surface brightness. Its small bright inner nebula subtends an average of 16.1 arcsec, with the outer prominent condensations about 25 arcsec.[4] Deep images reveal an extended halo about 300 arcsec or 5 arcmin across,[5] that was once ejected by the central progenitor star during its red giant phase.

NGC 6543 is 4.4 minutes of arc from the current position of the north ecliptic pole, Less than ​1⁄10 of the 45 arc minutes between Polaris and the current location of the Earth's northern axis of rotation. It is a convenient and accurate marker for the axis of rotation of the Earth's ecliptic, around which the celestial North Pole rotates. It is also a good marker for the nearby “invariable” axis of the solar system, which is the center of the circles which every planet's north pole, and the north pole of every planet's orbit, make in the sky. Since motion in the sky of the ecliptic pole is very slow compared to the motion of the Earth's north pole, its position as an ecliptic pole station marker is essentially permanent on the time-scale of human history, as opposed to the Pole Star, which changes every few thousand years.

Observations show the bright nebulosity has temperatures between 7000 and 9000 K, whose densities average of about 5000 particles per cubic centimetre.[6] Its outer halo has the higher temperature around 15000 K, but is of much lower density.[7] Velocity of the fast stellar wind is about 1900 km/s, where spectroscopic analysis shows the current rate of mass loss averages 3.2×10−7 solar masses per year, equivalent to twenty trillion tons per second (20 Eg/s).[6]

urface temperature for the central PNN is about 80000 K, being 10000 times as luminous as the sun. Stellar classification is O7 + [WR]–type star[6] Calculations suggest the PNN is over one solar mass, from a theoretical initial 5 solar masses.[8] The central Wolf–Rayet star has a radius of 0.65 R☉ (452,000 km).[9] The Cat's Eye Nebula, given in some sources, lies about three thousand light-years from Earth.[10]

16/02/2020 repost