Surprise! A Clear Evening... Great for Tests with Auto-guiding

It was supposed to be partly cloudy and then before sunset a wind came in a surprisingly cleared out the clouds!

I have just received a 50mm guidescope and I needed to test it with my old autoguider camera (see previous post) on the CATE telescope (Daystar 480mm scope) with a finder shoe that a good friend in Salem, Oregon made for the telescope.
The old autoguider didn't seem able to hold the stars still for more than 2 minutes and sometimes far less... hmmm... need to figure out why. I would have thought it was an issue of polar alignment but I took care of that earlier. I think it might be periodic errors in the gears that the autoguiding program just couldn't correct fast enough. Ah, the joys of chasing errors!

Here are a few of the final images, not cropped. Click on an image to get a better view.

The North American Nebula
DeepSkyStacker: 21 minutes, 16 frames
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 3200
Postprocessed with Luminar

Same as above but greyscale to bring out more detail

M 33 Galaxy
DeepSkyStacker: 22 minutes, 18 frames
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 3200
Postprocessed with Luminar

M 32 The Andromedia Galaxy
DeepSkyStacker: 30 minutes, 27 frames
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 3200
Postprocessed with Luminar

M 34 Open Star Cluster
Single shot: 1 minute
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 400
Postprocessed with Luminar

Comet 64p/Swift-Gehrels (the small fuzzy blue in the center of the image)
DeepSkyStacker: 8 minutes, 6 frames
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 3200
Postprocessed with Luminar

The Pleiades - Notice the nebulousness around the primary stars !
DeepSkyStacker: 12 minutes, 8 frames
Canon T3i (unmodded) ISO 3200
Postprocessed with Luminar