It was a rough night, but the only chance I had at any astrophotography until the weather finally clears sometime past the current forecast.
The moon was almost full. The ground was covered in snow. The temperature was around 22f/-6c. My mount was not happy, and let me know, jamming a few times while slewing and ending up like this:
Somehow, it found the target and I was able to guide, although it was far from ideal and hovered around 1 arc/sec.
Many of the subs were ruined by bad guiding or a focus issue I haven't figured out. I'm going to blame it on the cold.
Oh, and I accidentally set the camera gain to 0 instead of 100. 🤦
All this left me with ~3.3 hours of decent integration time, but the images were dim and made noisy by the moonlight. I lost some detail trying to clean it up.
It is what it is. At least I got
something. It's better than doing nothing and watching TV.
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