This night I continued my mosaic on Elephant's Trunk (IC 1396) with my dual-band filter - this time under full moon, clear nights are rare this month.
Challenges:
- I had some problems with my coordinate sync in the last session. The mosaic showed some gaps which I had to fill this night. I could not rely on Stellarium as unfortunately the new version 1.00 is unstable on my laptop, I decided to use PixInsight to plate solve and annotate my current mosaic, letting me read the coordinates from the image.
I needed to fill the gap in the lower left corner, so I set 21h37m / 57° for the image center withe camera rotated by 90°.
- The next challenge was imaging time. Meridian flip was estimated or 21h50. This was the first night this season I tried with the Astro Photography Tool's meridian flip in Session Craft using the original APT settings. Unfortunately no success, the scope flipped back to its 'counterweight east' position. I need to check the APT forum for the correct settings in EQMOD. So I stopped imaging, waited for a couple of minutes, and let the scope slew to the coordinates again - now with counterweight west. The APT Point Craft tool did a great job again - I was able to target the old images with only 1 pixel deviation.
- Guiding was great, even though the target was at an altitude of almost 82°.
- Imaging ended after 30 images - more to come tomorrow. But the results already look promising:
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