Integration time:
    * 111 x 120s (3h42m)
    * Total: 3h22m

Notes

13th August 2022 A small number of frames gathered before clouds rolled in once more.

    Integration time:
    * 165 x 120s (5h30m)

10th August 2022 Five and a half hours of data gathered last night. Compared to previous targets the nebulosity of NGC7822 is quite faint.

    Integration time:
    * 319 x 120s 
    * Total (10h38m)

Notes

8th August 2022
Another five hours’ + data gathered on a new target in Cygnus.

    Integration time (running total):
    * SII 25 x 300s (205m)
    * Ha 21 x 300s (175m)
    * OIII 23 x 300s (200m)
    * Total: 855m/14h15m
    
    Integration time target
    * Target: 20 hours
    * Progress: 71%

From latitude 52° North this target is at it optimum altitude now and will continue to be available for several hours per evening well into the darker nights of autumn.

10th July 2022 In the end it took five hours to stack the subs! The end result was good though.

9th July 2022 I recalibrated PHD2 on the EQ6R-Pro last night which worked fine. I then successfully guided to an acceptable standard. Unfortunately high cloud affected to whole evening’s imaging so only a few poor subs were captured across both the scopes. At the moment I am putting recent guiding woes down to poor transparency. To be monitored however and I will run PPEC at some point to see if guiding is improved further.

7th July 2022 First test of the GHS (Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch) script in PixInsight which I found intuitive (for a PI script!) and mighty impressive in its results. Definitely one to keep using and get good at. This resulting image is a massive improvement on the same target photographed last year due to this and, mainly, the EQ6R Pro mounted on a pier.

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.