Heart Nebula, Day 2

Day two of collection for IC 1805.  Scope set up started at ~9:25 and completed leveling and initial polar alignment with polar scope at 9:50.

Watched Legends of Kora. Very distracting.

Started KStars / Indi at 10:25pm and slewed to equator / meridian.  Launched PHD2 and started a drift alignment.  Between large deviations in Dec (wierd), appeared to be no significant azimuth polar alignment error.  Slewed on the equator as far west as prudent and examined altitude. This appeared to settle at ~2'.

Unloaded PHD2 and switched to internal guider in Indi.  Created a new schedule in Indi & started the job.  Slewed & performed plate solving w/o issue. Began guiding (defaulted to 3 second integration as used last evening). Internal guider required 2 minutes to calibrate before being to autoguide at 10:46pm.  Total RMS after 2 minutes: 0.84".

Copied over the first capture. Paused job. Checked for exposure (ok at 180s) and focus in Picasa.  Unhappy with focus. Checked on the camera... seemed reasonable on the Canon viewfinder.  Stopped job & slewed to Ruchban to perform a manual focus on that bright star.  Reexamined framing (fine) and restarted job.


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