It was the last two nights of the year and I had clear weather. What luck!
So, on Friday night, Dec 30th, I had to take care of unfinished business with the Horse Head from the last session. I had something to block the parking lot lights from next door this time. While waiting for the Horse Head to get into position, I took images of M33 (above,) which I hadn’t tried with the AT60ED, yet. It came out decent, I guess.
While taking the Horse Head, I noticed on the charts that a comet was in the field. It was C/2017 K2 (PANSTARRS), at magnitude 11.9 according to Cartes du Ciel.
I imaged until almost midnight on Friday. I left the mount setup and brought in the rest with plans to try again on Saturday, New Year’s Eve.
On New Year’s Eve, my plans were to go for M78. While it was getting high enough, I got some more data on the Heart Nebula – an hour and six minutes. I mixed it with the salvaged Heart job from a couple of months back at about 22 percent to help fill in some noise.
When I got going on M78, it gave me problems with tracking. I finally realized it was my guide calibration and after redoing it, I was back in business, but wasted almost an hour figuring that out. Consequently, by the time the clouds came at about 10:20 PM, I still had less than 2 hours of data. Oh, well… I’ll try again next year! lol
