The night of the 13th February saw the first clear night in parts of south Wales for over a month, so I took the opportunity to do some further tests with the society's Pegasus SmartEye unit using my Sky-Watcher Esprit 80 ED scope. Over the course of the night I tried half a dozen targets using two 2" filters; an Optolong L-Pro filter and an Optolong L-eNhance filter, with varying levels of success. Using the device in standalone mode in conjunction with Sky Safari, the planet Jupiter and three of its Galilean moons were overexposed for the minimum 0.5s exposure possible. A recent software update has now limited the minimum temperature to zero C in this mode and the auto exposure for the screen has also been removed, which makes it a bit trickier to acquire targets visually. As a consequence I was off target on several targets, however the data collection was useful for the tests; some of which can be seen in the montage. I had better luck with M51 (the Whirlpool galaxy) however and managed just over an hour's total exposure using the two filters 50/50% of the time. The data were collected in camera and were stacked in DSS and processed in Pixinsight and Adobe Photoshop 2026 with matching dark frames.
Click on an image to get a closer view
Leo triplet montage with Astrometry.net
Chris Bowden
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