Categories
Deep Sky Nebula Open Cluster

The Rosette nebula

Monday evening was the clearest of the year so I put the Zenithstar on the Astrotrac with the QHY9C and pointed it towards the Rosette nebula. The central cluster was an easy binocular object and using the red-dot finder the telescope was pointed without difficulty.

While the polar alignment looked reasonably accurate there was some drift in RA that I will need to eliminate. Cable drag is one possibility I’ve looked at before but I suspect that the Astrotrac is tracking at the wrong rate and may require recalibration.

Trailing was quite pronounced on 5 minute exposures but I took 19 images of this length.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *