After what has seemed like an eternity of rain and clouds, we finally had a clear night, and I was determined not to waste it. (There had been two almost-but-not-quite nights in the previous week. I had all the gear setup and ready to go, only for all the clouds to roll in and spoil the party.) By about 10pm the clouds had all vanished and even with the full moon I was able to get some good data.

Back in May, I captured some excellent data of Eta Carinae - the first time I’d had the telescope and mount out to a dark sky site.

The image I ended up with made me very happy - it was a (to my eyes) a brilliant picture of an iconic sight in the night sky.

Over the intervening months I have picked up more image processing skills and more confidence in pushing the data to reveal previously hidden detail.

Whilst the skies are filled with clouds and the rain descends by the bucketful, I thought I’d post up an image or three of what the fully assembled astrophotography rig looks like.

As you can deduce from the first two images, my view of the night skies can be quite restricted. I’ve talked about this before, but my location stops me from imaging almost anything under 30 degrees or so when facing North. Which means waiting until December / January before I can see highlights such as Orion and the Pleiades.

As mentioned in an earlier update, I now own a ZWO ASI183MC-Pro astro camera. The recent clear nights here (an unprecedented 4 nights in a row!) gave me the opportunity to get the telescope outside and to begin scaling the learning hill that is the next step in my progression.

It was not an easy first night. Having made two changes to my gear (auto focuser and new camera) I was not aware of how they would interact, nor what would be required to get things working.

Back at the end of July I wrote an update here that described my astro workflow, from setup to finish. Since then, I have been refining the procedure and can now get everything up and running a bit more efficiently.

I’ve made a few purchases and changes since then. The most critical being the purchase of an EQMOD cable, so now the mount is connected directly to my imaging laptop - completely bypassing the hand controller. In Ekos I have created a device profile that only contains the HEQ5 mount. This allows me to drive the mount during Polar Alignment without having to have all my imaging gear connected.

We had some clear nights arrive, although with the full moon, there was a massive amount of light in the sky. The moon was so bright it was casting shadows like the noon-day sun - with dark-adjusted eyes it was painful to look at it directly.

So, what does an aspiring astro-nerd do? They look to targets away from the moon as far as possible. In this case, something like 180 degrees away from it. Of course, the downside is that most of the good targets (Eta Carina, Southern Jewel Box Running Chicken, etc), are below my field of view.

You might recall my last attempt at imaging a not-so-distance galaxy, NGC55 and how I managed to get a passable image with “only” 2 hours worth of data.

After a month of clouds and rain, I finally had the chance to take the imaging rig out and try to capture more data. I ended up with a total of 5 hours of images. 240 imaged of 60 seconds exposure, and 20 images of 180 seconds exposure.

It seems to be whale season here, both in the ocean with the annual migration of humpback and southern right whales along the Australian coasts, but NGC55 is now visible in the early hours of the night.

After sorting out the power problems I was seeing, I purchased the next upgrade - an EQMod cable to finally remove the hand controller from the rig completely. It’s not a big change but makes life a lot easier because there are fewer cables on the mount, and one less piece of equipment to worry about.

The ASV held a ‘Nightscapes for Beginners’ session at their dark sky site. Initially, I signed up for this to get a better handle on composition - which I have trouble with. After a discussion with the person running the session, I backed out because my skills were a fair way beyond beginner level. A bit disappointing, but pretty understandable.

I offered to help with the session, and whilst I don’t think I offered much value to the people attending, the group did appear to get a lot out of the night’s work.

Now that I have a solid workflow happening - see the “It’s working!” blog entry here - with the mount, ‘scope and camera, I was impatient for clear skies to arrive.

A clear (and cold) night finally arrived and I was able to put the mount, scope and camera through their paces. Of course, nothing quite goes to plan and over the course of the night the temperature dropped from a chilly 8 degrees to a cold 4 degrees. The temperature change caused the scope’s focus (never super-sharp at the best of times) to shift and get progressively worse over the course of the night.