It was a very clear night after a cold front had passed and enough time had gone by for the winds to calm down again.  I setup before sunset and got ready.

The Moon was out and in conjunction with Saturn, which was right above it.   Unfortunately, the field of view was too narrow to include both in one frame without rotating the camera to another angle.   So, I just shot the moon

I composited together an overexposed shot and the first image and blended it to show the moon among a few stars.  Not quite what I was hoping for, but you get the idea.

The Pleiades is one of those images I end up with when I want to kill time while waiting for what I really want to image.  In this case, it was the Seagull Nebula, which was my main target for this session.

I maxed out for one night with 4.5 hours on this object, which when added with the session from last week, gave me nearly 6 hours on the Seagull.  Finally, an amount of time that gives very smooth results – once you add them all together properly.

Well, it was clear on Friday evening for a while when I started shooting the above.  The forecast was for it to remain clear.  I had setup and planned go the distance all night.  But, before too long, high cirrus clouds came in and parked over my location.   It was during the first exposure run on the Veil.  I took 40 shots and between clouds and guiding issues, only 18 were any good.

I took this small amount of L-eNhance filtered data and tried to combine it with the previous UHC-s filter data and the image below is what I got.  I was hoping for 3 hours worth, but it was not to be.

Not satisfied with the above image, I recombined the 18×180’s with the starless data I had from the previous session and came up with this rendition:

With Halloween just passed, I was reminded that I haven’t checked out my old friend the Ghost Nebula since last year.  So, I gave it a whirl when the clouds gave me a break for about an hour.

Unfortunately, the clouds came back and the only thing left to shoot was the moon rising in the east.  It was boiling and unstable low in the muck, but I got a shot of it regardless.

I called it a night after that and packed it in and went to bed.  But, wouldn’t you know it?  I woke up before dawn the next morning and went outside and looked at the sky.  It was crystal clear.   D’oh!

A full moon night, but it was clear and relatively transparent.  I needed to test some scope adjustments anyway, so I figured I would just do a few of those things, get a shot of the moon and call it a night.    I ended staying up all night and shooting a variety of objects, even with a full moon from the metro.

Not only was it a full moon,  it joined Jupiter for a conjunction, and I got a shot of that plus a few others: