Things did not clear up until around 11:45 so I spent some of the time testing out EthSrv program for my ST-237 camera. This camera using the parallel port to download images, and my new laptop doesn't have one. So I put the camera on my old laptop and set up the EthSrv. It worked great! I was able to run CCDSoft on my new laptop (which is much faster) and connect to the camera on my old one.
Once the sky cleared off I aligned and synched the scope on Procyon. Then off to saturn -- I've not had good luck getting planetary pictures with the ST-237 so I just wanted to see what would show up. Sure enough, I got an over exposed planet but I could see several moons. Oh well, I usually use my Phillips ToUCam Pro II for planetary imaging and thats not what's on the scope tonight.
So I moved on to Arcturus to try and see if I could get CCDSoft to work on my Windows Media Center PC so we could watch the images come on on the big screen TV. My friends call it the worlds biggest laptop -- with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse I can relax on the couch and watch the images come in from the camera. It's a lazy way to do astronomy, but has a high wife acceptance factor since she likes to see the pictures as much as I do. Then it stopped working?!? Hmm... on a hunch I walked outside to check and sure enough -- the clouds were back.
Fortunately they did not stay long so I was able to move on to M3 to try taking a long run for stacking. 100x 30 second exposures. I left that running while we played Lara Croft Tomb Raider Legend on the Xbox 360.
By the time the imaging run finished it was time to go to bed -- 5:12am in the morning. It had been a pretty good night.
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