However I am having a terrific time squeezing what information I can get out of them. Let me know what you think. We had missed several clear nights due to holiday conflicts and illness. Al Kelly and I traveled to Danciger Observatory under thinning clouds with the hope we could do some telescope work, if not some real imaging. I had resolved to use my new illuminated reticle eyepiece to polar align my equatorial platform, which to date has been a matter of plopping it down, eyeballing north.
Polar alignment is a good thing.
As the last sucker hole was shrinking, I thought I should try to shoot the horsehead nebula in Orion. I finish it taking a pretty good one of that and a barely recognizable picture of the horsehead. This is a mosaic of 2 half frame CB211 images, each being five 30-second images. Lots of processing and frankly I lost track although I think it has some rank processing and lots of stretching. The half frame images prevent the bright object smear obvious in the original at the start of the year.