Whirlpool in colour

Dave, You're improving, That's a lovely shot of M51, Is it hard to set up with the mount and equipment? Man you can relly see the detail in the spiral arms

Well Done!

Keith..

Thanks for the kind words folks. Its nice to get something positive after not getting to bed til 4... If only we could have one clear night, one cloudy night, one clear night, one cloudy night....

The mount itself is fine. I can set it up in about 10 mins now. The biggest problem is getting the 'scope orthogonal to it. That's what's buggering up my pointing difficulties. Having thought that there were difficulties with the mount, I went back to the manual (very detailed) and figured out that my scope was to blame (well, the optical axis). But AP give a good routine to fix that - it'll take some time but when I get it done, I'm hoping to increase exposure times above the 1 minute mark for DSO's.

Then I need to concetrate on processing - or get Dave Power to improve *his* processing..

By the way, you name the constellation that is the subject of the next wide-field shot and I'll list out the DSO's - we can then figure out how to image them. I was thinking that perhaps the larger DSO's (eg nebulas) would fit over the original image. Smaller DSO's might not work. However, a way around that would be to use callout boxes - magnified image of the area showing the DSO... What do you reckon?

Cheers
Dave McD

OK Dave. Easy one to start off with. I just took a shot of Corona Borealis the other night. Will you take images of all the DSOs in it please?

Hi Michael - might take me a while to take them all. If you think we don't need them all, let me know which ones to scrub. Also, looks like the weather is turning...




Cheers

Dave McD