Last night was the first clear night for a while, which introduced some new issues. To start with, my first target (below) -- which I chose to fill the time until the main target came up over the trees -- actually set behind the trees 20 minutes into a 100 minute shoot. Since I just start the camera and walk away, I didn't know that until I loaded the pics into the PC, so a waste of over an hour. The main target was my nemesis, the Fighting Dragons, but my phone kept losing the connection to the mount, so although the camera kept shooting, the image drifted a bit. Then the mount battery died, followed shortly by the camera battery.
Next fine night I'll try some tweaks to the process, but the camera battery is the weak link. The instructions with the new battery say it'll take 400 pics on a charge, but for various reasons mine can manage 250 tops. I have 3 batteries, but changing them can really mess up a shoot, as it's almost impossible not to move the camera when I'm poking around trying to remove and replace the battery. The easiest solution is to buy an astro camera, but I've stopped spending for the moment. I think I've spent at least $4100 so far all up. Not counting the $400 excess on the car repairs when I went to pick up the scope from Taupo and hit a fence post.
Here's my latest Carina Nebula, which I've posted here before -- this one is the sharpest by far, and because it's properly tracked using the wedge it uses most of the 6000x4000 camera resolution, reduced here to about 35%. This is from only 40 photos from a set of 100, due to the appearance of a damned forest above the house.
