M42 and M38
Celestron NexStar 5i
F6.3 EQ Mode on Wedge
MX916 CCD camera
October 30-31, 2003
I spent most of this night trying my hand at autoguiding the N5i. The first thing I must note is that seeing was much better this time than the last time I tried the N5i at F6.3 using the MX916. I was actually gun shy because of the poor images I'd gotten last time and didn't want to use the C5, prefering to stick with the short tube 80 and its more forgiving nature.
I only managed two keeper images this night because of all of the playing with self-guiding using Maxim DL/CCD and the MX916 with Star2000. And it was probably stupid because it really was a nice evening. But I'm glad I've finally gotten down to business and trying to figure out if I can guide at all. The result was that I had gotten the scope to ping-pong in RA giving me little snowmen stars.
But here are the two unguided images I captured.
I oversharpened M42 as you can see graininess.
