Pleiades (M45) Mosaic
12/14/23 - With clear skies and no moon, created a 3x2 mosaic in the Indi/Ekos scheduler for M45 using the 8" LX10 EMC SCT with the new Sv405cc and 0.63 focal reducer and the Svbony UV/IR filter. Initial polar alignment was waaay off -2500"... re-positioned the whole mount in several steps before getting lucky and sticking the alignment at ~4". Given a forecasted low temperature of about 28 F, set the camera cooler temperature to 25F (-3.8 Centigrade). Left the camera gain at default...which is a gain setting of 10. Focused with the Bahtinov mask...with only minor adjustment (half a turn). Forecast for 12/14/23 from Cleardarksky Seeing forecast from meteoblue for 12/14/23. Tested 180s collection...settled on 120s x 30 per tile in the mosaic. Guide errors were reasonable at <4". Indi allsky sky quality metric for 12/14/2023 Indi allsky star count for 12/14/2023 From this collection, obtained 88x120s light frames total (before tossing out poor collections ...