Spent the night of 10th March 2005 out in the boonies near Quriyat, Oman. Fairly low altitude, just 300m above sea level, but reasonably close to Muscat. Battled for 2 hours to get my autoguider to work. The thing just refused to take more than a couple of frames sequentially. Could not even get it to calibrate. Finally gave up and checked if I could photograph anything at all without autoguiding the Celestron CGE mount. I found that trailing started to show up with 3 minutes at a focal length of 840mm. Desperately searched for something that will frame satisfactorily at 600mm focal length and show something, anything, with 2 minutes exposures. Thus I settled to spend the night shooting Markarian's Chain of galaxies. At least the night was not a total waste. Read on, text beneath the pics...