Post by Deleted on Jun 12, 2016 23:10:05 GMT
Since returning from a star party a few weeks ago, we have had lousy weather. So Friday night (June 10) I was excited when the clouds parted and I was rewarded with a warm (78 F at 11 pm), humid (88%) but clear night. I had the mount back on the pier and the scope balanced and roughly polar aligned, but it took awhile to get up and going. I used my Mallincam Extreme 2 on my VRC-10 at native F8. Typically I use a Lumicon Deep Sky filter as my light pollution is pretty bad. When I used to setup in my back yard I couldn't use exposures greater than 7 seconds without overexposing the camera. With the high walls (80") of my observatory, my scope is better light shielded so I decided to try running without the filter. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to take 60 second exposures without washing out the image.
My first target was the spectacular globular cluster in Hercules; Messier 13. This is a single 20 second exposure.
Next was my favorite DSO; the Ring Nebula, Messier 57. This was the first DSO I imaged when I got into video astronomy with a Meade DSI III.
While waiting on Scorpius to get high enough to see Messier 4, 6, & 7, I turned my attention to Mars and Saturn. The Extreme 2 is not a great camera for planetary imaging (See Rick's posts for his images with the Mallincam SSI), but for a video imager my results were not too bad. First was Mars, a hard target, especially as I didn't install a Barlow. So to improve image scale I used the camera zoom which degrades the image quality a bit.
Next I went to Saturn.
Getting back to DSOs I found my tracking was poor, so I setup to do a drift alignment. I centered the scope on Ras Alhague (Alpha Ophiuchi) and was watching the star drift and then it disappeared ! Looking up I found that a wall of clouds was rolling in and my night was over. I couldn't get too disappointed as it was 2 am and I had enjoyed over 5 hours under the stars. Next time I'll start off doing the drift alignment so I can take longer exposures without better shaped stars.
My first target was the spectacular globular cluster in Hercules; Messier 13. This is a single 20 second exposure.
Next was my favorite DSO; the Ring Nebula, Messier 57. This was the first DSO I imaged when I got into video astronomy with a Meade DSI III.
While waiting on Scorpius to get high enough to see Messier 4, 6, & 7, I turned my attention to Mars and Saturn. The Extreme 2 is not a great camera for planetary imaging (See Rick's posts for his images with the Mallincam SSI), but for a video imager my results were not too bad. First was Mars, a hard target, especially as I didn't install a Barlow. So to improve image scale I used the camera zoom which degrades the image quality a bit.
Next I went to Saturn.
Getting back to DSOs I found my tracking was poor, so I setup to do a drift alignment. I centered the scope on Ras Alhague (Alpha Ophiuchi) and was watching the star drift and then it disappeared ! Looking up I found that a wall of clouds was rolling in and my night was over. I couldn't get too disappointed as it was 2 am and I had enjoyed over 5 hours under the stars. Next time I'll start off doing the drift alignment so I can take longer exposures without better shaped stars.