Hi all,
For the first time in nearly 6 weeks the clouds partially cleared and I was able to collect a few photons. I have just moved to a new position at a college close to DC, so the skies were rather crud but not as bad as I expected. LM was about 4.2. The campus observatory has a Meade 16" GPS, so I was trying that out with my ST9. (Note number 1: must get focal reducer!!)
The tracking was not too bad although there was a lot of vibration. (The telescope is on top of a 6 story building!!) The big problem was that the telescope is not well polar aligned, making it very difficult to locate objects on a small CCD field.
Eventually I managed to locate NGC 7331. The image attached is a combination of 20, 60 second images, meadian combined in CCDSoft to remove trails. Final processing in Photoshop.
Not the best of images, but with more exposure time and some colour filters, it could be a fun scope!
Cheers,
Maurice
For the first time in nearly 6 weeks the clouds partially cleared and I was able to collect a few photons. I have just moved to a new position at a college close to DC, so the skies were rather crud but not as bad as I expected. LM was about 4.2. The campus observatory has a Meade 16" GPS, so I was trying that out with my ST9. (Note number 1: must get focal reducer!!)
The tracking was not too bad although there was a lot of vibration. (The telescope is on top of a 6 story building!!) The big problem was that the telescope is not well polar aligned, making it very difficult to locate objects on a small CCD field.
Eventually I managed to locate NGC 7331. The image attached is a combination of 20, 60 second images, meadian combined in CCDSoft to remove trails. Final processing in Photoshop.
Not the best of images, but with more exposure time and some colour filters, it could be a fun scope!
Cheers,
Maurice
Attached Image:
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