What a beautiful night this has been! Apparently the cloud gods forgot there was no Moon and did not notice me opening my observatory. :) Following Tyler's lead I cut way back on my EFL going from 4,000mm to a bit over 1,800mm. Took 20 one-minute shots of the core of M-31 and 60 twenty-second shots of M-27. Then 20 darks and flats of for each object (you'll note from the vignetting on M-27 I didn't get its flat quite right). Stuffed all of that into CCDSoft and let it do it's thing for an hour or so (my Macs are fast, the one lonely Windoze machine I use to run TheSky and CCDSoft is not). And what follows is what popped out. It's getting late even by my standards so I didn't take a lot of time formatting or Photoshopping but I'm glad the stars look more like Jenny Craig graduates instead of the Sumo wrestlers I have been getting. :) http://utahastro.info/temp/M27-23OCT2006.JPG http://utahastro.info/temp/M31-23OCT2006.JPG Carpe Noctem! pw p.s. I tried shooting Comet Swan but the coma is so bright it burned out in no time and the tail is so faint that even a 10', tracked exposure showed only a couple of ribbons.