Pacman Nebula - NGC 281 and Spider Nebula - IC 417

 11/08/2024 -- With no clouds and the moon at 45%...but setting before midnight... started up the mount on the back deck with a goal of capturing light frames with the venerable LX10 with the dual narrowband filter and the new Starizona Corrector III flattener / reducer.  Ran PHD2 on the odroid XU4 and (even after leaving the mount out for a couple weeks of dry weather), the polar alignment is ~2' (drifting around over several minutes of guiding).  Focused using a laptop with AstroDMx-Capture before setting up the scheduler with two jobs: NGC 281 and IC 417 using 20x180s light frames with gain of 285, offset of 32 and at 5C with the SV405cc.  Watched progress on IC 417 and immediately noted issues ... initially suspecting clouds... but then noting the problem stemmed from some upper parts of the backyard tree leaves (very out of focus) being captured in some frames.

Seeing forecast for 11/08-11/09/2024 by meteoblue showing clear skies but significant moonlight until 23:00.

Indi Allsky backyard camera pseudo sky quality metric and star count for 11/08/2024 between 20:00 and 24:00 illustrating a sharp change when the moon set at 23:00 and the aAllsky camera gain changed.

Indi Allsky backyard camera pseudo sky quality metric and star count for 11/08 - 11/09/2024 between 24:00 and 05:00 in the morning showing gradually improving skies with SQM values near 4500.

Using ASTAP, stepped through the NGC 281 light frames removing nine light frames with clear problems from the mount shifting (blurred stars, doubled stars) largely based on wind.  Used previously computed dark and flat calibration frames and generated an initial stack...which appeared remarkably well calibrated with no indications of strong vignetting or large gradients.

NGC 281 (Pacman nebula) 43x180s light frames from 11/08/2024 stacked initially using ASTAP calibrated with 40x180 matched dark frames collected on 10/25 and 20 flats collected on 10/26.

Used ASTAP to similarly eliminate 20x180s badly guided (or in several cases at the end of the collection, completely off-centered) light frames. Sadly, this left only 21x180s frames to stack.  While the sky conditions were much better for IC 417 collection compared with NGC 281 (collected with the moon still in the sky), the weaker nebulosity and much shorter total exposure resulted in a weak signature in the initial stack created n ASTAP using earlier (though well-matched) calibration frames. Additionally, a slight gradient from left to right appeared in the stacked image.

IC 417 (Spider Nebula) 21x180s (3780s, 63 minutes) light frames collected from 11/08-11/09/2024 using ASTAP calibrated with 40x180 matched dark frames collected on 10/25 and 20 flats collected on 10/26/2024.

NGC 281 (Pacman nebula) 43x180s light frames (~2.15 hours) from 11/08/2024 stacked using AstroPixelProcessor 2.0(beta26). Under "0) RAW/FITS" option, used "supported" for bayer pattern and "Adapative Airy Disc" for algorithm. No other options selected. Used flat frames from 10/26/2024 and bias, dark and dark flat calibration frames from 10/25/2024.

IC 417 (Spider Nebula) 21x180s light frames (~1 hour) from 11/08/2024 using AstroPixelProcessor 2.0(beta26). Under "0) RAW/FITS" option, used "supported" for bayer pattern and "Adapative Airy Disc" for algorithm. No other options selected. Used flat frames from 10/26/2024 and bias, dark and dark flat calibration frames from 10/25/2024.

11/12/2024 -- No clouds expected tonight, but massive moon and poor seeing suggests captures tonight may not provide the highest quality new light frames... but with dual narrow band it may be worth an attempt.  Set up the scheduler to collect against NGC 281 until nearly midnight and then switch to IC 417.  Temperatures are lower tonight... and so the 5C temperature employed so far on the Svbony 405cc won't work...and so this is set to 0C for collection scheduled to go through 05:30.  Had verified polar alignment during an aborted attempt at collection on 11/11 (clouds and scheduler problems prevented collection with the mount & camera cooler shut down automatically at 01:00).  Scheduler did launch successfully at 21:30.  Indi Allsky background camera showed pseudo-sky quality metric of ~17,000 (in moon mode) ... a poor indication of collection potential.  Immediately noted serious problems with focus in examining frames shot through the OTA for plate solving. Swung to Schedar (2.25m star in Cassiopeia) to work on focus.