Following what is considered to be a very successful First Trial Imaging Session I decided that more time on the same subject would be really useful. I made this decision with following reasoning: –
More time to improve the signal in the 1st nights photo I think was warranted to reduce the noise
I was keen to see how long it would take to get an imaging session up and running when the software was pretty much ready to go
The weather on November 21st/22nd was unbelievably given as dry and pretty clear all night! I decided that I would leave the rig up and running all night of the 22nd. I was a bit nervous about this but after the first night and 4 hours of sleep I was in no shape to do an all nighter, anyway some of us have day jobs to get up for!
The setup was ok, for some reason my polar alignment took a little longer than the previous run and I was not as accurate as the previous night. Also I had unexpected issues with auto focus, basically I tried to just kick off an advance sequence with auto focus as one of the first steps. it failed with a bad R2 coefficient. I eventually recalibrated and vowed that next time I would move the focus position to previous focus position first and do an autofocus once first. Anyway, I kicked off the sequence of 120s images to run while the Bubble was above my local horizon, went to bed in some trepidation.
The following day was impressed to see the scope in its parked position, a good sign at least as this was the end of sequence I had defined in NINA. I completed the imaging session by running a bunch of Darks – it was still dark and temperature wise within a degree of what it had been overnight. I then ran my Flats.
That evening I therefore had 20 Darks, 20 flats and 132 2 minute subs. Adding this to the previous nights run and I have 6h 24’ of exposures.
Here is the result after some Levels / Curves stretches in Photoshop – no other modifications other than a minor crop to remove the stacking artefacts.
6h 24m on Bubble and Lobster Claw
On closer inspection there is definitely a reduction in noise from just the previous nights integration. Good to see the theory of more integration coming good.
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