NGC7331 - Season Finale

Between the Moon setting so late in the morning, ~3am, and the Sun rising so early (astronomical sunrise 3:35am), there's not much time to grab many exposures. And next month's monsoon will pretty much dampen any chances of imaging. But, you know, you can always sneak in one last shot (image above).

A single 8-minute exposure @ ISO800. (The sky was much brighter than what you see here and so a needed contrast adjustment muddied the picture a little.) 

So, this is probably it until the Fall, as far as imaging with the C11HD. By the way, the mount (Orion HDX110 has really smoothed out, probably due to the gears being run-in. Here's the autoguiding graph (image right). 

Total error 0.44 arc-seconds, which accounts for the detail in the galaxy.

In the meantime, I'm working on my "WFPIP" (Wide Field Portable Imaging Platform) and hope to take it up to Happy Jack next month. It's the platform I used to take the recent images of M8 and M20, the latter of which was taken running the rig solely from a battery.

More to come,

William Shaheen
Gold Canyon, AZ

For camera conversion services, i.e., having your DSLR "IR Modded" (IR filter removed), visit Life Pixel Camera Conversion Services here