Last week I finally got serious about putting the camera back to work. I spent every night from Monday through Saturday collecting data. It was a lot of work, but I used CCDAutopilot to handle some of the load, which allowed me to continue to get sleep and get my work done at the office each day. There are other advantages from using CCDAP, such as a more efficient focussing process (I'm now able to refocus every 30 minutes).
So far it appears that the results have been good. This image is a narrowband (so it's false-color) look at IC405, the Flaming Star Nebula in Auriga. I've been playing around with various combinations of color mapping to enhance certain structural detail in nebula, and this one certainly has a lot to explore. Click here to see a larger version of this image. I imaged the same region almost exactly a year ago, with fairly similar results, but I think this one may be slightly better. I've got data for about 5 more objects from last week that still needs to be processed.
Tonight is very windy, and there's a very bright moon anyway, so I've just got the camera collecting dark frames for the library.
I can hardly wait until the weekend...stay tuned for the reports.
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