My goal tonight was to hunt down a few more Messier objects. I managed to get my platesolving working but only got good accuracy in Cassiopeia for some reason. All good, it’s a wonderful place to get lost.

Clear skies from 5 PM onwards so I made a very ambitious plan to observe multiple targets. Had some issues with polar aligning and GOTO but managed to observe:

The Crab Nebula, Orion Nebula, Bode’s Galaxy, Cigar Galaxy, Messier 103, Messier 32, and as a nice bonus: Messier 77 aka Cetus A.

The mind boggling distance of Cetus A is 47 million light-years.

I started my session with a very long polar alignment in sharpcap and aiming at random spots in the heavens with the hope of platesolving my way to glory. When finally it worked I got to capture the ethereal glow of Messier 27 and Messier 57.

I also had a long look at Triangulum (Messier 33) but didn’t manage to capture it well. My plan was to observe much longer but it got too cloudy and my platesolving started to fail again. There is a lot to say about Messier 33, but watching another galaxy like this is something very, very special.

Now that I have everything figured out with the new equipment I hope to explore many more objects. However, with Mars opposition around the corner I might take out the dob again soon.

Whilst platesolving I also got photobombed by this guy:

I had two wonderful nights with little to no clouds and managed to:

• Align my polar scope
• Polar align manually with my knees in the wet grass
• Get decent tracking!
• Give up on polar aligning manually and buy the 10 USD sharpcap pro license
• Use sharpcap pro to polar align – this is so easy.
• Align the scope, which was a big hit and miss
• Making a total mess of connecting sharpcap, stellarium and synscan together to the mount
• Confusing my scope, laptop and eventually also myself
• Not collimating the scope resulting in horrible stars on my laptop screen

When I ordered the scope to go to Albireo, I felt some relief when I saw two little diamonds in the sky. Unfortunately those were two stars slightly west of Vulpecula. Still pretty close though.

Testing out my new EAA rig, a Skywatcher 130 PDS on a HEQ5 PRO mount.

This is what went wrong during the session:

• Rain till 8 PM, making it necessary to set everything up late when it’s already dark and cold
• Forgot to install the the ZWO drivers on the old imaging laptop I want to use
• Polar alignment difficult with the northern part of the sky being cloudy
• Underestimated the swampy nature of my grass, making it hard to level
• The part of my garden with perfect view on Polaris is also the dog’s pooping grounds

I tried to to do some star alignments. Aldebaran was close. Betelgeuse was funny as the scope pointed to the ground.

Still very impressed with this mount. I will set up everything during the day tomorrow and play around with it.

After literally weeks with clouds and rain I finally got to set up the scope again. My plan was to capture Mars but the seeing was again not optimal – I captured a lot of data but I don’t think it will lead to anything good post processing. This was also my first session where I really had massive dew, something I need to take care of.

My goal for the next weeks is to have a look at the Triangulum Galaxy and the Crab Nebula and today I had a first few peeks with the 25 mm.

I hope to capture them with my camera at some point too, I’ve purchased a focal reducer to increase my FOV, I’m curious what I’ll manage to get.

I did capture some other nice sights. One of them is Albireo, I remember I posted about this in july after I made a picture with my phone. This one is definitely better.

I wanted to end the night with Orion but clouds made me call it a night.

I had a short but focused session last night. My initial goal was to capture Mars and Uranus with the planetary camera but the supermoon made things a bit difficult. I hope to revisit these planets later this year.

The summer triangle is slowly moving away from my usual observation sights so I’ll need to say my goodbyes soon to Vega, Deneb and Altair. New other prominent objects are showing up now, such as the lovely Pleiades.

I decided to have one last look at M57 and took an almost 4 minute exposure with the ZWO224MC.

The reward was worth the effort:

The area with the least clouds for me lately is everything within the summer triangle.

It’s actually possible to capture M57 with a smartphone and 25 mm eyepiece:

Clear, dark sky today, unfortunately on a midweek, so little time to observe.

I had a good look at the Dumbbell Nebula again and failed to find M56, a globular cluster. I did find another target though, the Blinking Planetary Nebula, with very little effort (or lots of luck, not sure).