First Auto guiding attampt, NGC 6946
June 21st, 2009
The skies finally cleared last night allowing me to have a go with my upgrades from the last few weeks. For a target I chose NGC6946, the fireworks galaxy, it’s impossible for me to see it from my site with an eyepiece and even a two minute exposure only brought out a very faint core.
I had everything setup reasonably quickly and managed to locate a guide star after quite a bit of mucking about, the 70mm F12.9 refractor really needs a focal reducer, the field of view if tiny and the web cams tiny chip does not improve it much at all.
I went with 6 minute exposures with auto guiding controlled by PHD guiding. It seemed fine most of the time, but every so often the scope would for some reason move and the guide star would shift just enough for PHD to loose it. This resulted in several lost frames each time it happened, the scopes had slipped pushing things out of balance which may explain the problem.
Still for a first attempt on a faint object with only limited exposure time it’s not terrible. I’ll have to revisit this one in the future and get another couple of hours of data.
