The Bubble Nebula is a faint target that I was able to capture now that I’m using autoguiding. By using PHD Guiding (Push Here Dummy Guiding) I’m now able to take exposure 2 minutes long (or longer in some cases). This allowed me to get a ton more detail than I was ever able to before. I didn’t even have very good alignment this evening, but the autoguider takes care of that! I’m getting one more target and then I’ll be calling it an evening. Overall, a very exciting evening.
September 23, 2008
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Flintstone Stargazing 
Nice work, Ed!
Your pictures are getting better and better. I wish I have the time to follow your example but, unfortunately, I do not. At least for the time being. I do have much to learn about aligning and tunning my telescope.
With my current setup I can’t take pictures longer than 20-30 seconds in prime focus because the objects start drifting out of the field of view in a bouncing movement. I don’t know if it’s bad alignment or something wrong with the mount but I suspect it’s both. What do you think?
Thanks Ed.
Comment by Ricardo — September 23, 2008 @ 6:38 am
Thanks – In terms of what can cause that kind of motion in the image, I’d guess it’s a bit of both alignment and periodic error in the mount. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past 2 months figuring out how to get better alignment on my mount and now I’m starting to use autoguiding to take care of the other problems.
Comment by Ed — September 23, 2008 @ 7:55 am
And what’s your opinion about the PEC function on the LXD75 mount? I’ve read all over the internet people complaining about it. Saying that it does nothing to correct the periodic error. In fact most say that it’s better without the it.
I haven’t tried that myself. Have you?
Comment by Ricardo — September 23, 2008 @ 9:45 am
I haven’t really tried it yet – I was planning on trying soon and using the autoguider to make the corrections. I’ll do a post on it.
Comment by Ed — September 23, 2008 @ 10:20 am