Post by brianb on Aug 10, 2012 11:55:58 GMT
A rare event occurred on the night of August 7/8 - the sky was clear! Discovered an issue with the mount on my CPC 1100 which has been unused for months as a consequence of cloud cover & went with the backup plan rather than wasting time trying to fix it. So, using my old LX90 SCT tube, deforked, on my HEQ5 mount.
Collimation was needed but well worthwhile as the seeing was unusually steady. I thought I was going to have great fun when the moon, Jupiter & Venus got high enough to observe but unfortunately the seeing deteriorated to poor to bad ... and heavy dew was a nuisance too.
First target was the moon, in view of the deteriorating seeing I went for a prime focus mosaic rather than closeups. Took ages to shoot all 22 panels .... even longer to process .... and I discovered a major issue with the camera not being square to the optical axis, resulting in definition not being uniform. So I didn't finish tidying up the finished mosaic. Some areas are really quite good but others are disappointingly out of focus. See what you think. (Click twice for HUGE full size version)
Jupiter had an interesting double shadow transit but the seeing was really going off & I was only able to get a small image scale. Still working on improving processing but here's one which shows two satellites (Europa off the disk to the left, Io in transit across the disk as a bright spot) and shadows of both satellites.
2012 Aug 08, 0406.8 UT. LX90, 1.4x tele-extender, Planet Pro 742 IR pass filter, DMK21.
Got lots more which I'm still working on, this post will be added to later.
Collimation was needed but well worthwhile as the seeing was unusually steady. I thought I was going to have great fun when the moon, Jupiter & Venus got high enough to observe but unfortunately the seeing deteriorated to poor to bad ... and heavy dew was a nuisance too.
First target was the moon, in view of the deteriorating seeing I went for a prime focus mosaic rather than closeups. Took ages to shoot all 22 panels .... even longer to process .... and I discovered a major issue with the camera not being square to the optical axis, resulting in definition not being uniform. So I didn't finish tidying up the finished mosaic. Some areas are really quite good but others are disappointingly out of focus. See what you think. (Click twice for HUGE full size version)
Jupiter had an interesting double shadow transit but the seeing was really going off & I was only able to get a small image scale. Still working on improving processing but here's one which shows two satellites (Europa off the disk to the left, Io in transit across the disk as a bright spot) and shadows of both satellites.
2012 Aug 08, 0406.8 UT. LX90, 1.4x tele-extender, Planet Pro 742 IR pass filter, DMK21.
Got lots more which I'm still working on, this post will be added to later.