Big Mount and Small Scope

Here is a picture of my HD200C mount and Celestron C8 SCT. The mount barely notices that it has a scope attached! I have a JMI NGF-S focuser as well as a small motorized control for the main mirror focus. This makes it easy to image from the kitchen table in comfort.

The HD200C is really the mount for my big scope the "Behemoth" as my family has named it. It is a 17.5" newtonian that I built from the optical parts of a Celestron Dobsonian and new high quality Mirror Cell, Focuser, Aluminium Tube, and Spider. I learned a lot about my scope by rebuilding it. you can see a picture of it on my web site (Big Telescope)

It looks like the clouds are clearing off tonight so off to take more pictures!

Polar Alignment

Tonight I set up my 8" Celestron SCT on my Parallax Instruments HD200C so that I could try using PemPro to drift align the mount.

It was an interesting adventure -- the graphs from PemPro are very sensitive. I was able to align the mount to the pole and take a few pictures, but it took most of the night. That was expected since this is the first time I have tried aligning using a CCD camera and software with my HD200C mount.

I'm hoping for a clear saturday night so I can take advantage of the alignment to shoot some good pictures tomorrow night. I was able to get a short color shot of M13 before going to bed at 5:00am. I am slowly learning how to optimize my equipment and technique.

We'll see what the rest of the weekend brings.

Cleaning up Images and Subscribing to SLOOH

Tonight was a short evening. I took out the scope to check on an update to PemPro that fixed the trackbox problem some of us were having.

I didn't plan to do too much as it was pretty clear that clouds were going to invade my sky before too long. I set up the Teleue NP-101 with my ST-27 camera and used FocusMax to bring Pollux into focus. Then I started the test run with PemPro. It worked perfectly, tracking the star just as it should. Bug fixed!

After the successful test, I decided to try imaging M95 before the clouds got too bad. I took 60x30 second images with varying degrees of success at dodging the clouds that were moving in. I stacked the best of the images to produce the picture above. As you can tell I will have to learn how to take flats to clean up the circles caused by dust on the detector. Of course I'll also figure out how best to clean off the detector itself.

Toward the end of the photo run, the images starting getting dimmer so I knew the clouds had finally caught up with me. So tonights astrophotography session ended early.

My folks were up visiting so I decided to bring up the SLOOH telescope on the big screen TV so we could look at some of the objects being observed. I subscribed to their system for 100 missions so we could check out the telescopes and try out the service.

SLOOH calls their observing sessions missions. Since they are located in the Azores, they are in darkness in the early evening and clouds here don't mean clouds there!

We watched several missions, including some very nice nebula. I will start observing through SLOOH more often.

Well it's not too late, but we have to get up early tomorrow so goodnight all!

Saturn's Majesty

Tonight I wanted to get some closeup picture of the planet Saturn. I'm using a Philip's ToUCam Pro II web camera with K3CCDTools software.

I configured the camera using a 15mm Televue Plossl for eyepiece projection. After aligning on the moon, I was able to locate Saturn and center its image on the camera's chip.

I shot 20,000 frames and stacked the resulting images using K3CCDTools planetary wizard. A lot of work to produce the image shown above, but seeing tonight was really poor.

I'll have to come back with one of my longer focal length scopes and try again. But for now, off to bed.