NGC 4302 and Others.

 

My horizon for many objects limits the amount of time I have to image an object as it passes from the high trees to the east to the house roofline on the west. After I’ve subtracted time spent dithering ( a significant amount, if you’re using short exposures like I do) and removed frames made unusable by passing clouds, satellites, alien spaceships and astral-traveling Tibetan monks, the final integration may only have captured 50%-60% of the time I was actually at the scope. In this case, I managed to get 43 minutes of usable data from my captures. Clouds were the main culprit and these images were captured through holes in about 70% cloud cover. My goal was to capture NGC 4302, which I did; but there were a number of other interesting objects in the captured field. The first image shows the full field as captured by the RASA/DS10C. The second is a crop of NGC 4302 and NGC 4298. The third image shows a crop of NGC 4524—a beautiful spiral. The fourth image is an annotated image of some of the objects in the field. I’ve noticed several that astrometry.net did not seem to identify; perhaps they were too faint.