Another club member, Ray, was
using the memorial scope until about 10:30 PM, and the sky was covered in high clouds
anyway, so I did some timelapse looking toward the Orion nebula. I also tried to set up the Meade refractor
that’s on the CGEM mount, but I couldn’t get a guidescope attached to it. I looked at some things visually through the
big Dob the club owns – M42, and galaxies M81 and M82. I also looked at Jupiter in the memorial scope
and club member Mark's SkyBridge.
After Ray left, it was still cloudy,
so I decided just to check out a couple visual things while the timelapse
went. I synced to Dubhe in Ursa Major
(Jim figured out the bad gotos by the way – using “warm restart” keeps the
previous pointing model, which messes up a new night. So use “cold restart” instead.), and then
plugged in the celestial coordinates for Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak and
went hunting for it with a 38mm eyepiece.
There were a few things that caught my eye, but nothing that really had
any discernible nebulosity to it. So I
plugged the camera in and got that all set up, and then went back to the
coordinates. I took a 60-second image –
and there it was! A little fuzzy ball
near the center of the frame.
Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak, Nikon D5300, Vixen NA140ssf, Astronomik CLS filter
Guiding: QHY5, Celestron 102mm
11x180s, ISO-3200, no flat (it came out weird)
Because
there were still some high clouds, I only did 180-second images, and because it
was already so late, I only got 16 before I had to quit. Also, guiding was not that great so close to
the north celestial pole. I also made a video from the subframes - it spans 48 minutes.
Timelapse GIF of Comet 41P moving through Ursa Major. Each frame is 3 minutes long, and there are 16 frames, spanning 48 minutes.
[Sorry for the fast speed - I don't think I can control it. The background brightness difference is from a thin high cloud that rolled through at the beginning.]
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