Thursday 10th September 2009Tŷ Du Observatory

It’s been a while since I’ve been here but after a summer of distractions, and cloudy skies, I finally managed to do some imaging last night. Imagine my horror when I found an email from my ISP in my inbox this morning saying the site had been taken down as it had been compromised by hackers!! I had another email this evening saying they’d made a mistake which is a weight off my mind as I’d resigned myself to doing a complete rebuild of the site over the weekend.

It was a bit of a spontaneous session but I thought I’d blow the dust off all the equipment and see if I could remember how it all goes together. I’d left the Canon 300D attached to the eyepiece tube of the scope after the last session figuring that the dust cap on the scope was as good as anything I had for the camera. Not only that but I didn’t have to play about with the focus either

A quick squirt of lens cleaner on my donated refractor lens and a wipe with a cloth and I was ready to go.

Ursa Major was nicely positioned for me align the mount using Dubhe and Mizar as alignment points for EQMOD. I used the Starry Night software to slew the scope to M51 to test the focus and make sure everything was still working. The battery was dead in the Canon, but I had a spare so didn’t waste too much time getting that sorted out. It took a few attempts to make everything work but I got there in the end.

I’ll have to have a go at making a Bahtinov Mask one day but for now I’ll leave the camera attached and the focus lock tightly done up!

After M51 I moved on to M13, M27 and finally the Veil Nebula (NGC6960) before the spare battery gave up and I called it a night. It’s the first time I’ve seen the Veil as the field of view on Canon is wide enough to cover it but the Atik 16ic which I’d been using previously would have required me to do a mosaic.

I only managed 2 frames of the Veil before the battery went but it’s encouraged me to look again and maybe next time take enough frames to bring out the detail.

I still desperately need a coma corrector and keep looking on ebay to see if I can get one cheap but I’ll have to suffer egg shaped stars for the time being.