This evening it was clear skies and great opportunity to image the Jellyfish Nebula as it would be visible for several hours from where I setup the scope.

I was super excited to capture this nebula, it looks awesome and my daughter was excited to see the jellyfish shape! So I got everything setup, tracking was smooth, polar alignment was as perfect as I ever had. After 2 hours of imaging I loaded the image into pixinsight and gave it a quick stretch, and all I see are stars. I stretched some more, still nothing.

Turns out according to nova.astrometry.net I was a little off target. IC443, the location of the Jellyfish Nebula was just out of frame above my frame. This was really strange, as I used the NINA function for framing and slewing to target, plate solving to confirm on target it all said I was aligned.

Lesson learned, clear sky wasted 😦

In future before starting the imaging session I will capture a single frame and check it on nova.astrometry.net to verify it’s correctly aligned before proceeding. Here’s the link to where I was actually pointing https://nova.astrometry.net/user_images/9215960#annotated

As you can see from the solved plate, I was pointing just below the Jellyfish Nebula, designated IC443

I did get a beautiful picture of the stars however!

Update: I had some success the next evening, see the follow on here.