PEC at last, maybe.

Finally a clear night, maybe. And the end of my head cold, maybe. And an understanding of how to use PEC, maybe. Results to be posted here, maybe.

The results: PEC seemed to work fine, although I have no way at present to objectively confirm that. My setup (AT72ED and autoguiding ST80 side-by-side on the mount) was far out of balance, and I had to up the PHD signal length to 1000 ms. That allowed PHD to correct for the problem, but the results were less than desirable. My target was M44--high cirrus precluded looking at nebular targets--and it was more an exercise in LRGB imaging and processing. Here's the result:

Messier 44

This is a fairly unimpressive cluster, with quite a few blue stars. Normally I don't like diffraction spikes, but they might add some visual interest to the image. (L=20x3min, R=10x3min, G=5x3min, B=10x3min). I spent a lot of time trying to get the color right. I'll probably redo this using the color balance workflow suggested by Ron Wodaski.

Just to give you an idea of what the PEC was trying to deal with, here is the PE for my CGEM:

8-minute cycle of PE, average of 10 runs

That's about 18 arcseconds peak-to-peak.

I've now jury-rigged a couple of dovetails together to get my setup balance, so next time I'll see if I can get things tracking better. Next time promises to be some time off as the weather has moved into a period of instability. *sigh*