Here’s a center crop of M33 that I took recently.  It didn’t come too bad, all things considered.  Notice that there is an asteroid to the right of the nucleus of M33, before that bright star.  That is 1503 Kuopio (1938 XD,) a mag 14.3 asteroid that just happened to be in the shot.  So, I got two for the price of one for this gig.  🙂

The weather was great for the first part of this session, but conditions deteriorated at the end.  Out of the 80 sub-images I took, 3 were no good since there were some tree branches in them.  The last 20 or so were pretty dim and of poor quality because the sky transparency got really bad.  The final color and quality of the image probably suffered by using them, unfortunately.  I might do another stack and exclude those and see if it makes a difference.

Oh, one more thing.  I was debugging a new (used) laptop I put together for running my planetarium, guiding and image acquisition software.  Its a 2.5Ghz i5 Intel-based laptop with 8GB RAM, 250GB 7200 RPM HD running a 64-bit Windows 7 Pro OS.  I cloned my old XP laptop and I can run it as a virtual machine on the new setup under VMWare Player.  The old XP machine actually runs really well like that.  But, it would NOT allow me to see video in PHD Guiding when connected to my Orion Starshoot autoguider.  The video output was corrupt and the exposure timing is not working correctly, so it is not usable.  Everything else USB worked, btw, including the Canon software doing LiveView on the virtual machine  Oh, well…. live and learn, as they say.