5AM Orion Nebula

Waxing gibbous moon, poor seeing and sketchy clear sky forecasts offer few reasons to head out to the park or to my favorite darkish sites at Harvard Massachusetts or Myles Standish Forest.  I decided to image M42 from the patio at 5AM. 

Scope was setup using two alighment and two calibration stars to get some pointing accurace. No ASPA polar align of the AVX mount was performed. The hard guiding work would be the onus of the auto guider. 

I woke around 0330 EDT to early to start imaging so I listened to a couple of podcasts until 0445 when M42 would be close to clearing the #@%&ing tree in front of my patio. This would be a practice session to further familiarize myself with the Orion Magnificent Mini Auto Guider.

After reawakening the mount from hibernation mode from last evening's setup I slewed to Rigel to check pointing accuracy. Rigel was spot on in the center of the ASI294MC Pro sensor. I slewed to M42, fired up the auto guider, tweaked the guide scope focus and did a PHD2 calibration. Calibration took less than 5 minutes.

For fun I decided to layer sets of 25x2 sec and 25x8 sec exposures and experiment with local tone mapping to expand dynamic range. This is new to me largely because most astroimaging howto articles focus on Adobe Photoshop or occassionally on freeware Gimp. I use Corel Paintshop Pro X9. One result follows. Bummer that the star to the right intruded with stray light. However, there will be plenty of M42 opportunities over the next few months. 

M42