It was clear last night, the first truly clear night in a long time, but very cold.  Ambient temperature was -18c. I opened the dome and started things up, to have a series of mount problems.  Guiding was very ragged, jumping around a lot.

I suspect this was Periodic Error Correction being unhelpful – that the PE curve has changed since I adjusted and rebalanced the mount, and PEC was now working against me.  I used an hour to gather new PEC data but never did get to the point where I was happy with the correction.  However, the uncorrected PE was reporting as fairly small (+/- 3), so I decided to just do some guided capture without the PEC.  Turns out that worked very well.

This is the time of year that B33 (Horse Head) is visible over the house, between the trees, so I started that for the season.  Unfortunately the previous problems meant that I only had an hour left and, sure enough, after 55 minutes image capture started to fail as the target began to encounter tree branches.

So, just as a sketch, this is the start.  This is 55 minutes of Red light, as 11 5-minute subs.  Guided but no PEC – I’m quite pleased with the guiding.  More light and other colours as the season progresses – it’s forecast cloudy again for several nights now.