6th July 2022 I rebalanced the mount last night and realigned using the NINA Three Point Polar Alignment. The balance was slightly off and the polar alignment was four arc-minutes out on the declination axis. This might have contributed to the recent poor guiding. it is now set to within 13 arc-seconds. Unfortunately the capture sequence failed when the sky became overcast. I did however manage to get some nice footage of the waxing moon before nautical dusk fell.

2nd July 2022 I ran the 200PDS on the Cave Nebula in narrowband and the Askar on the Cygnius Loop in OSC. Amazingly my tweaks to the AZ-GTI mount seem to have made the guiding work and although the guiding standard deviation was horrible the result was very tight round stars on the Askar. The guiding on the Newtonian was awful too and I think that the extreme humidity was affecting the seeing quite badly.

Gathered a few short hours of HA data for a future project. Full moon tonight made broadband imaging difficult.

While the M51 project still has plenty to do to complete, a new project was started - the Iris Nebula (NGC7023) in broadband. Around eight hours of integration time were logged on the 8th, 10th and 11th June and this will be augmented over the next few clear evenings. Unfortunately in summer in the UK we have only 3 hours of semi-darkness and no astronomical darkness whatsoever.

First light with a new widefield refractor and one-shot colour camera.