With the days getting longer, and the nights corresponding shorter, opportunities for imaging get fewer. Friday night at the observatory looked promising though and once it started to get dark Dan and I had a crack at M57 using his modified Canon 1000D. More on that later. By this time, Cygnus was getting higher in the eastern sky so we moved onto NGC 6888, an emission nebula.
With viable guide stars on top of the nebula, and with it ideally placed for the Alt-Az 20″ (low in the east) we settled on 1 minute exposures at ISO 1600. A few were rejected due to bad tracking but overall the results were very good. The tracking excursions were limited to the Alt axis which we’ve seen before. The usual fix if it’s problematic is to add or remove nose weight but on this occasion it only affected a few frames.
