M31 and M57 with my Toucam - 30th August

My plan last night was to get some more data for my widefield narrowband NGC7000, but I'd underestimated the moon and it was clear I wasn't getting anywhere.
I was using my reflector as a guidescope with my Toucam, and the DSLR piggybacked on top. So I decided to do away with the DSLR and try for a few deep sky objects with the webcam. I haven't actually taken any proper long exposure images with it since March (M42), because that's when I got my DSLR, so have been using that since. It doesn't really make sense seeing as since then I'd modded it with the amp-off mod and rehoused it with peltier cooling. It's just been neglected as the guidescope cam, poor thing.
I went for two objects I can find in an instant, M57 and M31:

Narrowband bubble and M52 - 27th August

This is a composite of two images, one is the narrowband image of the bubble nebula, the other is an unfiltered one of the nebula and nearby cluster M52. I didn't plan to use the last image, it was just a test shot when finding and centreing the nebula - but it makes a nice addition. The only processing done on that one is light pollution/moonglow removal, and increasing the star's colour a bit.
As for the nebula image, I fell asleep during the last half hour of imaging..and didn't wake up til dawn (to find everything dripping with dew). As a result I didn't take any dark frames... and my later attempt involving the camera and fridge just seemed to make the image worse. Instead I imported each of the subs individually into photoshop, and using the RAW tool I reduced the noise/hot pixels, reduced the vignetting and upped the exposure a bit. Then I exported them all as tiffs and stacked them with DSS, combined them in Photoshop and did lots of noise reduction and level tweaking.

M27 + M57 in H-alpha/O-II - 25th August

Here are my first autoguided pictures! Clouds and early mornings have meant I've only just been able to try everything out, and I'm well chuffed with the results. The main reason I wanted the autoguiding was so I could make real use of my narrowband filters, so I went last night for two planetary nebulas. I wanted to use my 2x barlow on them, but it's the standard skywatcher one and just seemed to make the focus all soft and fuzzy, so I went without. The sky was very hazy last night, when I was last out I could make out the milky-way from my garden, but last night the light pollution seemed worse, and the moon was about.

Perseid pictures and videos - 12-13th August

It was as though a little window in the clouds had opened up here just for the meteors last night. The clouds left at 8pm, and returned at 4am... perfect! I walked out of my town with 3 friends (who only stayed til half past midnight) and it was well worth it. During the whole night we must have seen around 60/70 meteors. Not quite the predicted frequency, but plenty of really bright ones that left smokey trails.
I had the camera set taking 30s exposures at ISO1600, and got 287 pictures before the battery died. Only two had caught meteors: I also got another video of one with the webcam to add to the two I caught the night before:

http://www.12dstring.me.uk/meteor1.wmv
http://www.12dstring.me.uk/meteor2.wmv
http://www.12dstring.me.uk/meteor3.wmv

M16 - Emission line image - 7th August

This is my first proper stab at emission line imaging. I went for M16 because I've seen some nice narrowband images of it around... and I really like it, I only had about 2 hours to play with before it went behind a tree, so I aimed for about 30 mins each of H-alpha, O-III and S-II with the rest of the time for finding it, swapping filters, refocusing...etc I started with 60 second subs but the tracking wasn't great, so I had to drop it to 45 secs, but that still had some problems and I had to throw quite a few subs away.

M16, a night of disasters - 5th August

As last night was very clear, I thought I'd drive out of town. I don't often get to get away from the light pollution, and haven't taken on shots of DSO's out of my town yet. But last night I was able to, and as it was really clear and the moon wasn't rising to fairly late... I was excited. I decided my target would be M16 - something I've wanted to get for a while, but is only visible for small periods from my garden. I figured I'd be able to get a good 2 hours of subs before the laptop battery ran out. So I packed up, and drove off. That's when things went downhill....

1) After setting off to the darksite, I realised I had forgotten the laptop.. no problem, I could get back in 5 mins.

2) I had charged up a set of batteries for the tracking motors to use a few nights ago, but never used them because I ended up using the mains instead. They went dead within 5 minutes - usually they'd last hours. Not to worry I thought, I had brought a spare set which I had charged up before coming out, so I popped them in. All was well.

3) I couldn't find M16. I had studied a sky map before coming out, but I couldn't see any of the stars I was going to use to find it. I think I found about 3 other nebulas before finally locating it 15 minutes later.

4) By this time the laptop was saying it only had half its battery life left - 54 minutes. As it had been plugged into the mains right until I left, and had only had it on for 15 mins... I was puzzled. If it did run out, it wouldn't be too bad as I could just take photos with the remote release and my watch. So I started rattling off the subs.

5) 10 minutes later, I opened up the laptop to check on them, and noticed the stars were starting to trail. I look over at the motor handset... and see the blink blink blink of the low battery led. I had managed to get just 20x 30 second subs, when I'd planned to get 120 x 60s. After crying, I unplugged everything, and lay on the ground clicking away the shutter button taking darks and flats.

If I'd been shooting from my garden, no doubt the light pollution and rising moon would have washed out the subs too much, but luckily the sky was dark enough (and the nebula was bright enough) that I could get an ok picture from it:

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy - 2nd August

I was out last night with the intention of shooting something to the South, but it was totally covered in clouds (when they cleared the moon was so bright that I couldn't make out any stars in that direction anyway, so it's just as well). Whilst waiting for the clouds to clear to the South, I pointed the telescope North and decided to find M51, something I know how to find from memory (but never could). Luckily I noticed a distinctive triangle of stars on the edge of the screen which I knew was nearby - so centred it and ended up rattling off 1hr 15mins worth of shots before it sunk below a hedge. View the full picture at the galaxies page here.

First Picture of Mars - 1st August

This is my first (non-widefield) picture of Mars. This planet is tiny at the moment. I was using a 5x barlow, and this image has been resized about 400% Getting it on the screen was a nightmare. One of my least favourite things in astrophotography is finding planets at a focal length of 3.75m.