How NOT to Take Images

My mount and my guiding were conflicting with each other, so I got this crappy image of the Iris Nebula

How NOT to Take Images

My Time Machine for most of my imaging these days is my SVBONY SV503 102mm/f7 refractor. It sits on top of my Sky-Watcher EQ6R-Pro mount and has a ZWO ASI2600MC camera on it. There's some other stuff, but this is the main configuration. On top of this is a ZWO ASI120MM Mini guide-scope that steals a small piece of the light that come through the main tube. Software then looks at this small piece of the field of view and tries to find a nice, bright star. It then tracks this star so if the star moves to the left, the computer will tell the mount to move to the left to keep the star centered. This is called guiding and it is a key tool for taking long exposures of dim objects while still having round stars and sharp images.

Last night, I tried taking my first ever images of the Iris Nebula and for some reason, my guiding computer and my mount control computer got conflicted and the guider was telling the mount to move all over the place while the mount was saying, "no, I need to track the object that you told me to track." The result was 136 two-minute exposures, only five of which didn't have massive streaks of stars in them. You can see what I'm talking about in this image. The left side shows the streaky image that the camera captured, and the right side shows the stacked image of those five pictures. Because there's big gaps between the images that I could use, and the tracking/guiding was way off, there's lot of banding and other artifacts in the image as well.

Unfortunately, this data isn't worth keeping, but for those of you who subscribe to my Patreon page, I'll leave the raw data there so you can play with it yourself and see if you can get any meaningful images from it. I'll see if I can try again tonight. Maybe I bumped the scope while I was setting it up and messed up the polar alignment or something. Unfortunately, it's supposed to be partly cloudy tonight, so I may not get any useful images anyway.

Oh well. The life of a time traveling Astropotamus is always full of adventure!

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