Had big plans this weekend; the Clear Sky Chart claimed I’d have my first two clear weekend nights since the mount was delivered. M57 is a challenge object on CN this month so I figured I’d grab some LRGB plus some ten minute Ha and OIII exposures and put together something nice. Waited a couple of hours Friday night but it never cleared. Sat in the observatory for an hour Saturday night waiting for light, fast-moving clouds to pass, then started a long series. Clouds came back; I left the series running in case it cleared but that never really happened. Got a few L, R, G, B frames and a couple of Ha but that was it. I am accustomed to getting by with less data than most folks like to use, but with only three or four each LRGB frames things are gonna be noisy. Only got two Ha frames; also inadequate. I never tried to stack only two frames before – CCDStack2 did that surprisingly well but it wasn’t very smooth. The original plan was to shoot 1X1 and crop to make a large M57 image. When I saw the clouds I switched to 2X2 for shorter exposures so no cropping.
Larger (but not great) version at: http://www.cloudynights.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=27599&size=big