Deep Sky Imaging Session - June 29, 2014

I, together with some members of the Astronomical League of the Philippines headed out to Caliraya, Laguna again for a deep sky imaging session. Although the weather prediction is not that good. We proceeded as planned and were rewarded with one of the clearest imaging session that I had encountered. Absolutely no clouds!!! I brought along my CCD imaging gear which includes ATIK 16HR ccd camera on Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS L lens mounted on top of Vixen GP-DX mount. Well, Murphy's Law is once again there to tryu to ruin my night as I had to struggle figuring out why my autoguider is failing me and cant locate star. It took me more than an hour to figure out the culprit and it was my blunder not checking that my guider had a very very out of focus star and was trying to lock on noise which I thought were faint stars in the field! :) LOL Silly old me :) LOL Nevertheless, I got my tempo back and started to image NGC7000 North American Nebula and IC5070 Pelican Nebula in Cygnus. To capture both of them at the same time, I had to use my Canon lens set at 100mm f/4.5 to frame both nicely. Unfortunately, with the guidestar blunder, I lose more than 1.5 hours of time thus I was only able to do a RGB set of 1.5 hours only as my mount had reached meridian flip mount reversal mode :( Oh well, I will try to get the luminance and Ha channel in my next imaging session . With less than 1 hour left before dawn, I quickly catch up with a short exposure of M31 Andromeda Galaxy in Andromeda to finish my imaging session. I also ended up imaging a very long crepuscular rays before sunrise :) It was a tiring but fruitful session despite Murphy's gremlins haunting me during the early evening :) Group shot taken by Jeremy Arabes.