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July
17-18, 2003 : Pulled another nearly an all-nighter
Let's see.
Let's get the excuses out of the way.
The sky was clear
though wispy clouds developed late. The Moon rose a little after 11 and the
sky was pretty bright. I put the C5 on Ray's Brackets somewhat forward but maybe
not enough to balance the Celestron 6.3 reducer/corrector, flip mirror, 25mm
silvertop plossl, 9x50 RA finder plus the Starlight Xpress MX916 camera.
While GOTO was great again finding everything on the chip, the mount didn't
track as well as it did the last time out. I am not sure how evident it is in
these processed images, but on individual frames, the faintest stars show an
almost packman shape to them (circle with a piece missing) which suggests a
funny sort of wobble, even at only 60 seconds. Stacked frames can show faint
stars with a hole in the middle.
The other problem
was seeing. When Mars rose it had these gorgeous diffraction spikes coming off
it which I guess indicates a "thick" atmosphere, for lack of a better
term. Arcturus twinkled madly. So despite my doing my best to get good focus,
the vast majority of my images were soft. I tried to isolate the very best for
stacking, but that didn't leave too many. My stars are fat and the images are
soft and overall, I'm not very pleased.
I need to address
the balance issue right away. I need to learn to judge seeing though I'm surprised
the extent to which it hurt me at F6.3 (ish -- with the flip mirror it is North
of this, but how much I do not know.) And as always, I need to take more images
regardless of the exposure but I have a problem doing that since I'm still into
quantity over quality. I need to get a bee in my bonet over a particular object
before I'm likely to follow through. Or maybe I just have to take enough mediocre
images to get disgusted with myself or perhaps stop meeting with the approval
of my NexStar buddies so that I stop being lazy and start being more serious.
;-) You guys are too easy on me!!!
I took some nebula
images - M16 The Eagle, and M whatever the Crescent is, but I didn't like them
at all so I didn't bother. As it is, M27 is soft and does not show much depth.
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