Well, following a couple of cloudy nights I decided to smuggle the telescope home. I had some apprehensions as to whether my spouse unit would flip out when she saw the thing, and to a certain degree I was right. A day or so after lugging it up the stairs and into my study Peggy happened to step in and saw the monster sitting in the corner. Being an understanding soul she registered a mild complaint and let it be. Maybe she knew it meant I'd be home a whole lot more now. We'd talked about putting a telescope on top of the garage for the past year so this was just one step toward realizing that goal. It will be a while before that happens so I am now putting the scope together each clear night on part of the driveway in the back yard. It is nicely flooded by the light from a streetlight and from the floods on my next door neighbor's house, but given the limited sky available (lots of trees) its the only logical spot. At some point I will address the lighting problems, but for now I still have lots of work to do to learn about the telescope, camera, control software, etc.
For now I'm using the Meade DSI pro ccd camera, and processing images using MaxIM DL/CCD. MaxIM is pretty good; it isn't as flexible as using something like iraf, but for now it does all I need it to do. I got the color filter option for the camera so that I could, if desired, create color images combined from three b/w frames taken through R,G, and B filters.
The next reasonably clear night was that of January 24/25. I bought a heavy duty rolling tool cabinet to store all the accessories as well as the eq head, counterweight, some star charts, etc. I set up on the driveway, leveled the mount and pointed roughly north. Not surprisingly the tracking was not great and the goto performance was crude at best. Still, I just wanted to check the collimation and hopefully perform a star test to see what the optics were like. The seeing wasn't good enough to do a star test so I just did my best at collimating and decided to try a few images. First up, the Orion Nebula. Its easy, bright, and was well placed. So I attached the f6.3 focal reducer and the camera and pointed toward M42 in the finder. After fiddling about with the focus I got fairly small star images so decided to take a series of short exposures. Eight seconds seemed good. Here's what I got:
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To say I was surprised would be to understate things
by a few megaparsecs. I'd been away from amateur astronomy for over a
decade and my gawd what a difference! I can recall long cold nights
back in Michigan trying to get a good image of the Orion Nebula using my
home-built astrograph and 4x5-inch cut film holder, guiding through my 8"
telescope. I spend days trying to get a decent picture and never
really succeeded. Yet, with 96-seconds of total exposure I got the
image at left. Amazing. Below are a few more images I acquired
just knocking around during that evening and the following couple of nights.
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ngc 2903 |
ngc 1952, M1, The Crab Nebula |
M82 |
Saturn! |
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M65 |
M42 - The Orion Nebula |
M66 |
ngc2158 |