Walter's LogBook
	Thu/Fri September 16/17, 1999

As usual, I set up on the front porch in Oshawa. It was breezy tonight with a low temperature of +11C -- summer is defintely over. (I had my winter observing clothes on tonight!) The moon was up until after 23:00 and the clouds didn't go away until after 1:00. But then the winds were still a problem: my focus star was dancing all over the CCD subframe! I decided to wait another hour for the winds to die down a bit (which they did). In that hour I did some variable star estimates.

I imaged just one object tonight: M74. This is possibly the dimmest of the Messier objects, but it is pretty, so I went for it. The wind and associated bad seeing resulted in only 110 of the 235 frames I took being of acceptable quality (~47%). Still, the image is not bad. I think the same exposure from the country would be a very nice image (the contrast would be much better).

I did more test shots at dawn:

• M 32
• M 110
• M 79
• NGC 147 (very faint -- not a city object)
• NGC 185 (dust lane above core)
• NGC 672 (long streak)
• NGC 772 (looks like an interesting spiral)
• NGC 891 (spans chip diagonally!)
• NGC 925 (weird looking)

are all a nice size at f/6.3.

M 74	55½ minutes (111 x 30s)
M 74 in one-shot colour: at the limit of suburban imaging!