Sunday night unfortunately I did not meet up with the group in Binbrook. With the 9pm gate opening, I was thinking that I would not have enough time to set up for imaging before it got dark.

Anyway it worked out great in the end. I really enjoyed the comforts of observing and imaging from home and the bonus was that the sky was absolutely crystal clear and fairly dark (mag 5.5). I started out by observing my usual favourites. M51 and M101… what a huge difference in view compared to Thursday night. I could cleary make out the two bright cores and the fuzzy spiral arms of M51. M101 was much easier to see without averted vision. Afterwards I spent the rest of the night imaging targets like NGC4565, M57 and NGC6871. By the time I was ready to pack up it was late enough that I could catch a glimpse of the beautiful summer milky way.

My Sunday night setup

NGC4565 – I love observing this edge on galaxy. (NGC4562 is the faint smudge below)

M57 – I had to try this target again. I wanted to get a sharper focus so that I could capture the 15th magnitude central star

NGC6871 – an interesting looking open cluster in Cygnus.

Realizations after the long night:

-An LPR filter needs to be on my ‘must buy list’
-imaging with the 80mm APO and using the 6in as a guidescope might help with getting
better quality longer exposure images
-It might be a better idea to concentrate on imaging only one target per night
-Imaging is more challenging than I ever imagined.. gathering the light frames
is only half the battle, post processing is the other half.