M97 - a ghostly owl (Tom Gray)

M97 - a ghostly owl

This poor quality image consists of only 15 minutes out of an hour of exposures. I completed a reasonably accurate polar alignment, using the PA tool in PHD, and proceeded to set up 5 minute exposures, before discovering a problem!

I had moved my mount to the other side of the house to image the NE sky, and completely forgotten to accurately level my field tripod/wedge assembly - the result a series of images which 'drift down the screen'. PHD tried valiantly to correct this, with an RMS ~0.8", but I expect was competing with the tracking box in Autostar Envisage, the result a smeared image proporting to be the owl nebula.

No problem, I had saved every uncombined FITS image... however, neither Envisage, Nebulosity, Deep Sky Stacker or Penumbra were able to reconcile these despite identifying suitable reference frames and alignment stars. I am surprised that these could not be aligned and stacked, but then I don't pretend to understand these complex algorithms.

Learning from one's mistakes is an important part of this hobby, let alone life, and there are no shortcuts. So often we are tempted to only publish our best images, but these do not tell the full story of our successes, our failures, our frustrations, or our efforts.

Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams

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Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3501414
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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