First light for my brand new Gemini mount.
M51 is quickly turning into "the M42 of spring"; an easy to shoot, easy to find target
that distracts me from other nearby objects. Anyway, it was a nice simple target,
which is what I needed on a first night out with a new piece of gear.
First try at the spring galaxies this year. This was a "gimme" image -- the stupid sky wouldn't cloud over
and it was 1:30am, so I said "why not?" and fired off 2 hours on M51. Good focus, nice dark sky.
It went back to the unguided well one more time, this time positioned post-meridian-flip.
I was losing a lot of images (because I failed to rebalance the scope after the flip),
and I needed to try out the ST-4 with the new mount anyway. Another gleaming success story.
The ST-4 literally needed no custom configuration (I just used startup parameters!), and
the G-11 tracked beautifully, even though the camera was definitely not lined up with the mount's axes.
The 2 hours of clean data is definitely a big difference over the 1 hour's worth I'd been getting before, and the mount is definitely allowing Veronica to live up to her potential. I see now that I was definitely mount-limited before... not anymore.
This is another set from the same night. This is 20 three minute images, and it "feels" like a slightly better image than the stack of 5-minute images. shrug. It's late.
This is my first halfway decent shot of M51. It's a *lot* smaller than most of my targets.
This is a stack of 10 five minute images, and it looks like I still need a lot more work to get a decent shot of this guy.