A few nights in Maryland Part 1

M3

I was in Frederick, MD for a week with the scope which afforded me couple of opportunities for  a little more DSI-2 imaging. The moon was between a young crescent and first quarter. I like to keep different night sessions separate by creating a date named folder.

It dawned on me to bundle dark frames in a single archive and copy it to the new folder for each night of imaging. This improves the odds of the Envisage software finding a compatible set of dark frames for the current session. Dark frames are coded for temperature and Envisage complains for more dark frames  if the temperature changes significantly.

M13

Only one night offered half decent transparency. On the first night with any transparency 6/6/11 I managed  bag four  globular clusters i.e., M3, M5, M13 and M53. Because, I'm still in the familiarization mode my record keeping for these was poor. The images appear to the below.

In my next DSO imaging round I will try imaging without the mirror diagonal on the hope it will improve the roundness of the stars. The DSI-2 also offers  options to sharpening during imaging. However, according to Meade you give up some sensitivity

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  M5

M53