I started
out with my C8 at the parking lot for that weekend’s Camper Stargaze, and I
mostly had it on Mars and Saturn. I got
to show them to a lot of kids, which was awesome. I figured out that the easiest way to get
them to the eyepiece is to simply rotate the star diagonal downward, since I
don’t have a step stool yet. This seemed
to work well, besides the shortest of kids.
It was decently dark that night; in fact, it eventually got dark enough
that I could finally make out the Milky Way, first time this summer. I also discovered that 1-star alignment on
the NexStar mount really isn’t bad – it got me within a degree or two of the
object I had it slew to. Pretty
impressive. I did the one-star alignment
because earlier in the evening, Jupiter was bright enough to see in twilight,
but I wanted the telescope to track with it so I wouldn’t have to keep
adjusting it, and luckily Arcturus is also very bright and was visible not long
after Jupiter was. And even with just
the one-star alignment, tracking was quite good – a given planet stayed in the
eyepiece for longer than at least 20 minutes, even at medium power.
At around 11 PM, I packed up the C8
and moved over the observatory, where I already had the C11 set up but not
aligned. So I got it aligned, but then
it was just slightly too far off from north for me to polar align it. So I nudged the tripod a bit – I was
adjusting the mount anyway, right? – and the rest of the alignment procedure
still went pretty smoothly. So I finally
started imaging the Trifid Nebula, which I’ve been dying to image! However, it was coming out much dimmer than
it had from the single shot I took on my C8 on Friday night. I should have known – dew built up severely
on the corrector plate while I was aligning. But I didn’t check until after I’d
already gotten a bunch of images on the Trifid, and some on the Lagoon Nebula. I cranked up the temperature on the dew
heater, and one of the club members who was hanging out went inside and got a
blow dryer, which cleared it up fast.
But it wasn’t long before it came back – my dew heater just couldn’t
keep up. I need to figure out how to get
the dew shield to attach more tightly.
But I got a decent set on the Lagoon Nebula, and then also grabbed about
45 on M13 as a consolation prize. Trifid
will just have to wait until this weekend…
M8 Lagoon Nebula, Nikon D3100 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer
47x30s, ISO-3200
M13 globular cluster, Nikon D3100 on my C11, f/6.3 focal reducer
28x30s, ISO-3200
Also, my friend Anton bought me a year
subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom.
So I’m learning how to use Photoshop at the moment. I turned up the red on this Lagoon Nebula
image, since my camera has an IR filter which blocks some of the red.
The
oddly-shaped stars are mainly due to the dew, but also a bit due to not-perfect
collimation. This weekend, since I’ll
stay set up and aligned the whole time, I’ll take my time collimating at
twilight so I can have good collimation when it gets dark.
Speaking
of this weekend, I have some new toys to try out! So fellow club member Will is letting me try out his Orion ST-80
as a guide scope, which has a 400mm focal length. He’s also letting me try his Meade DSI IIc as
a guide CCD. I’ve been scrambling the
past week to get all the parts I need to attach it to my telescope, but the
final things are arriving tomorrow and Thursday – the dovetail clamps I got on
ADM only came in a set of one, so I ordered a second one, and one of the rings
Will gave me is cross-threaded in the hole where it attaches to the clamp, so I
ordered another set on Amazon for only $20 (they have nylon screws – later, I
can get a set of replacement metal ones with rubber tips for only $30 on ADM if
I’m having trouble with flexure). I got
the dovetail bar attached to my telescope tube, so that’s all done at least. I’m hoping either I have enough room left on
the counterweight bar to balance it, or that the club will have a spare
counterweight I can borrow until Uncle Chris finds his second counterweight and
sends it to me. This set up provides a number
of interesting possibilities to experiment with over this long 4th
of July weekend. First of all, of
course, guiding – probably due to light pollution I’ll be limited to less than
5 minutes, but that’s still better than 30s and will allow me to get finer
details. (I also bought an
intervalometer for my DSLR, since Nikon hasn’t released the SDK for the D3xxx
series so no one can write software to control Live View or bulb mode). I can also attach my DSLR to the ST-80 and do
wide-field imaging on that. I can also
take off the guide scope and use one of the clamps as a piggyback attachment
for my DSLR for super-wide-field tracked imaging, since it uses the same
standard 1/4-20 connection. Also,
Miqaela is bringing her Borg apochromatic refractor from Randy, so I can
attach that using the rings for the ST-80 and we can image on that, since that
won’t have the chromatic aberration that the Orion will. So, lots of stuff to do this weekend! The weather is looking hit-and-miss, but not
terrible, at least – partly cloudy and mostly clear nights all four nights, and
little chance of rain the whole weekend.
I did also buy a thermal and waterproof cover on Amazon for the
telescope, and I hope it fits. At the
worst, I can take off the counterweight and it’ll fit.
Can’t wait for the long weekend!
Next post: #48 - Friday, July 1, 2016 - When In Doubt, Borrow Someone Else's Scope
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