There have been a few images of the Sombrero Galaxy appearing in the astro social media recently and so I thought it must be in a good position for imaging, but little did I know about it being so low in the sky. This, coupled withe the night's getting shorter meant that I wouldn't have much time to capture some data with my new astro camera, the ZWO ASI 2600mc.
I got an ASIair Pro with my secondhand EdgeHD 9.25, but unfortunately my Altair Astro 294c colour camera isn't compatible with it and so I've not been able to use the ASIair for one-shot colour imaging until now. (I have used it previously with my ZWO ASI294mm mono camera).
I set up early so that I could make sure I had everything I needed before it got dark - with imaging so infrequently it's so easy to forget something. I did a manual polar alignment but I couldn't get guiding to work so I switched it off. I'll be looking at this again on my next session, but for this night I manually focused using a Bahtinov mask on Capella.
Once I framed and slewed to the target I realised that it was very low in the sky and shortly my house would be in the way. The lack of guiding was a problem at my scope's native focal length of 2350mm and f/10. Nevertheless I managed to get 30 decent 3 minute light frames after discarding as many bad ones.
The image was processed in PixInsight with BlurX, NoiseX and StarX as usual.
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