A double cluster for the early Winter evenings

I am now beginning to get active again, with imaging DSO's. I've not done any of this for a while, because I was starting to find imaging, stressful.

I was spending more time trying to figure out why my guiding was all to cock, than actually doing any imaging.

I am now feeling better  thanks to an easy fix.

I am now using my old and very small and light weight, 60mm finder scope which I've had for 16 years. The finder allows my guide camera to see considerably more stars because of the very short focal length (200mm) and a very wide field, than my WO ZS66SD could ever do, and this makes for better guiding with less stress, and more fun.

I wish I had done this sooner. Maybe I could have done something with my Vixen GP-DX, who knows.

Yesterday evening and quite by chance, the skies here in Macclesfield cleared suddenly, and I was able to take advantage of this break to try my Nikon D40 dslr.

The subject, because at 8pm it is very high and on the meridian, was NGC 884 and NGC 869. Both of these open cluster's fit nicely on the CCD imaging sensor of the D40, which makes a huge difference over my Atik 16ic.

I was imaging through my fast SPX 200-800 F4 "AG" deluxe, using a Baader MPCC with out a CLS pollution filter. The exposure times were all 0.30 seconds totalling 6 mins. Guiding was done using PHD and my Losmandy G11.

The darks and the subs where then stacked in Deep Sky Stacker with any additional processing done in CS2.