Lovejoy from Torrance Barrens at -24C

Tried again tonight. Took nearly an hour to get there - all the time the car themometer kept sinking - is this mercury leaking from the car? Ought I to have stayed home?

Used a tracking system for the first time coupled with 3 multiple 30sec exposures:

Here is another single 30 second exposure:

I next tried  zooming in but the reading appears to be wrong. 18mm wide angle, 200mm max zoom
(Pleiades):

And then I tried the sword/M42 in Orion:

I think the correct FL for these last 2 was 200mm and for the first 3 18mm.. However, the text file says 113mm for all of them and that is not true. Camera frozen? M42 was cropped and resized so you cannot go by its appearance here. Or the value remains fixed when I switch to manual focus  - have not noticed this before and will look into that. wob