I had a tough time last weekend with my cheap Celestron tracking motor, so I thought I would piece together something beefier. Well, after wasting one and a half nights on that, I dug the old Celestron motor out of the garbage and reinstalled it. Tracking was much better with that, unfortunately. After a lot of fiddling around and getting back into the feel of things, I attempted to get a few frames of IC 5146, the cocoon nebula.
The seeing was not good tonight at all. The stars jumped all over the place as I watched them in the camera live view. Between that, clouds coming in and out, and fiddling with the tracking, I was surprised that I got anything out of the night at all. This is 29 frames of 30 seconds each, 1600 ISO.
I did get the Baader MPCC coma corrector, and wow, does it work well! I’ll probably do another post about it soon.
