After a week of solid rain we finally got a break in the clouds, it was a Friday night and I was about to leave on a trip. So just before getting ready to cook dinner I tossed out the scope and got it aligned shortly after dark. I put the cover on the scope... just cause its the Caribbean and went to cooks so Daddy special (Spaghetti with Meat Sauce... not cause its amazing but because my family says its my go to dish).
I had seen that the Rosette Nebula was going to be up tonight and since I had never imaged it I decided it was my target. But I had some time to kill before it got high enough so I did another failed attempt at the Western Veil Nebula and gave up and move over to NGC 253, the Sculptor Galaxy. As most Galaxies are its a little small for the RASA but it turned out pretty good. During post processing I just cropped the image so that the galaxy was larger instead of shrinking the entire image down to 1080p.
I'm glad I had time to look at other targets first because I was having a heck of a time with my guiding. I use N.I.N.A as my imaging program cause it helps with framing the shots and sequences and also gives me some nice monitoring graphs for focus and star count. Plus it automates the plate solving and auto focus. The nice thing about N.I.N.A is it Debayer's and Auto-stretches the last image so you can see what you are doing. But I also like to see a preview of the final image using live stacking... For this I use the Folder Monitor in SharpCap to live stack the images that N.I.N.A has taken. However, if you forget to turn off dithering in SharpCap then it tells PHD guiding to dither even though N.I.N.A is in an exposure... so yeah, once that is figured out my guiding got a lot better.
On to the Rosette Nebula, this one looked pretty cool in SkySafari so I thought I would give it a try, and I'm glad I did. Was able to take 240 - 30 sec exposures and use about 183 of them. Focus was pretty good and the post-processing is starting to click, I think that is the way most things go, once you finally figure out your process things get a lot easier. Rosette Nebula turned out to be one of my best images so far, really happy with how it turned out.
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