After shooting LDN 183 in Serpens Caput, I headed over to LDN 564 (amp; co.) in Serpens Cauda. There is a lot going on in this picture. The low position of this area in the sky resulted in a gradient which I failed to remove.

Date: June 1, 2014
Time: 1:30 am - 4:00 am
Camera: SBIG STF-8300M
CCD Temperature: -12 C
Optics: Takahashi Sky 90 II @ 406 mm fl (f/4.5)
Filter: Astronomik L
Light frames: 21x5 min
Dark frames: none
Flat frames: 25
Bias frames: 25
Binning: 1x1
Guiding: Orion SSAG @ Orion finder (~162 mm)
Mount: AP Mach 1
Dithering: Manual
Processing: Stacking in DeepSkyStacker, Curves, Levels, and gradient removal in PSCS6.

Other notes: This was a pretty busy night. I saw Mercury for the first time ever - thanks to Vince for pointing it out to me.

The night started with a bump. During the first exposure, I noticed that the autoguider was not having a good time. Since the spikes I saw in PHD lined up perfectly with times of high winds, I didn't think much of it, and since this only ruined one frame, I let it be. It wasn't until I started imaging the second target that I realized what was going on. When the wind picked up, I could clearly see that the guide star would move. However, it only moved in RA, not DEC. This made me think that perhaps the problem is not so much with the wind but with an error I had made while setting up the mount. After all, a bump from the wind should move the scope in a random direction, not just along RA. Once the first frame finished I verified the clutch knobs on the RA axis and sure enough, one of them was not as tight as the others. Once tightened, I had perfect guiding for the rest of the night - even when the wind picked up.

Overly attached blog followers might have noticed that I haven't posted an astro image since February. This is not for a lack of trying. In March, I had my first attempt at discovering a new object. Based on a lousy source image from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey that showed a perfectly spherical gas shell, I tried to verify that that gas shell was real and not just an image artifact. Unfortunately I was not able to see anything in my images, so it most likely was just an artifact. I'll be doing more of these 'Special Projects' in the future, so please don't panic if you don't see a new image for a while as I expect a lot of those outings to be busts.