Slow Start with the 26c - Part 1

It seems an age ago since I was posting about my initial attempts with the Altair Astro 26c camera.  The Summer has been and gone, along with the light nights when it's hard to get anything meaningful done.  Then the weather has come along and a whole bunch of other life excuses.  Finally though, some clear nights and opportunity to get out and roll back the observatory roof.

A couple of weeks ago, we had some visitors staying with us for a few days which coincided with some clear weather.  Somewhere somehow I found my mojo and it was all systems go and it was a pleasure to be able to sit with them and give them a quick demo.

The target for the night was M33.  But, things didn't exactly go to plan.  A couple of hours into the imaging run, cloud rolled in and I started dropping frames.  It was time to call it a night.

A couple of nights later, after our visitors had left, we had more clear sky, so I set about getting another couple of hours of data.  The first part of the mission complete, I brought all the files inside and started evaluating them only to find around half of them were fit only for the bin.  Everything from aircraft, numerous satellite trails to whatever else seemingly decided to make their way through the middle of the target, so into the bin they went.  It left me with about 90 minutes of exposures left and with little in the way of clear sky in forecast for the coming week, I decided to make do with what I had.

Considering it was only 90 minutes, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

To round off, a word on filters.  Over the last few years, I have almost exclusively used an Altair Quadband filter on all my targets.  I'm now realising that this is probably not the best or most effective way of gathering data for all targets.  I need to start paying a bit more attention to what I'm going to image, and therefor, what filter (if any) I need to use for it.  As well as my QB filter, I also already have a UHC CCD filter which will also fit my filter drawer.  Time to start some research!