A Rather Frustrating Night

Tonight was rather frustrating to say the least.  Buoyed up by taking the Rosette and Heart Nebulae a couple of nights ago, I decided to move my tripod mount to the other end of my garden in order to see some different targets than the ones I've been imaging recently - bad move!  

In my original position I'd got setting up down to just a few minutes as the tripod was level and it was already pointing at Polaris making polar alignment quick and easy each time.  Moving the tripod meant that I had to level and realign it and for some reason tonight it just didn't go smoothly.  I'm not even sure now if I was aligned on the Pole star!

That said, I did manage a half decent photo of NGC 281 - the PacMan Nebula in Cassiopeia.  It's not as good as either of my two previously nebulae shots as the stars are not completely round. But it was great to locate it and get something that resembled the target, despite the smoke from Bonfire Night part 2 and my neighbours' patio lights shining directly in my face.  I used the same exposure as last time, 7 minutes at ISO 800 with an l-eNhance narrowband filter on a crop sensor camera modded for infra-red light sensitivity.

After this I redid my polar alignment and things seemed to get worse!  Clouds were also starting to appear so I started rushing things and quickly went for B44, the famous Horsehead Nebula in Orion. I only had time to do one single shot and, whilst doing it, I managed to click the tripod resulting in the 'tadpoles' you can see in the image below.  In spite of all this, I was very pleased to see the horse's head pop out of the nebula as this was the first time I've ever seen it. This single record shot took quite a lot of processing to remove noise and make it acceptable for viewing. But don't worry, I'll be revisiting this one a few times this winter!

I finished the evening on a patch of cloud-free sky almost directly overhead and fortunately M45, the Pleiades in Taurus were showing quite well there.  I've never managed to bring out much of the nebulosity in this open star cluster, and the same was true of tonight. Another one to revisit methinks.