Another clear night, or so I thought.  It wasn’t until after midnight that I realized I’d been imaging through the clouds. That’s always the danger when you choose to sit in a nice warm room while the scope is remotely controlled in the cold night air. At least it didn’t rain.

I took some more shots of the Veil, but when viewed through cloud it’s not easy to make out even with 10 minute subs! M3 was a starting point, with M101 next. M101 was very faint and I should have realized then that something was not right. It’s usually bright on short exposures but 17×90 second frames wasn’t enough to show any of the detail on this spiral galaxy.

M3 Globular Cluster	M101 Galaxy 17x90 secs	The Veil Nebula (West)
		I’ve really stretched this to bring out the wispy strands of the nebula, and in so doing have accentuated the bright area that appears in all my Canon images. I think this is something to do with the collimation of the scope and/or the camera being slightly off the central axis of the light path. Maybe when I get a coma corrector it’ll go away