I’m starting a Moon Observing program with the Astronomical League. Today is the first day, yesterday could have been the first day except I couldn’t find the Moon in the haze. I found it tonight though. Here it is zooming in.
Mars & Saturn 6/11/2016
After a few middling shots of Jupiter with the color ASI120MC, I decided to go gray with his brother the monochrome ASI120MM using color filters. Mars was first and I chose red since it supposedly shows more detail with a red filter. I stuck with prime focus as the seeing wasn’t good enough for a barlow. I think things turned out pretty good. This is a stack of the best 20% of 10,000 3ms frames.
Next up was Saturn, I stuck with red because it was in there. I was so impressed I stuck with red. I did later try a light blue filter but it blocked so much light I went back to red. There was so much detail I may just switch to monochrome with a filter wheel. The two cameras have the same number of pixels but since one is color it effectively has a third the pixels of the other. This was a stack of 20% of 4000 37ms frames, note the exposure was almost 10x that of Mars.
Now check this out, here is how Saturn came out after stacking with no other refinements. When I saw this I knew I was on to something.
Jupiter & Hand Controller Wednesday night
The seeing looked good for Wednesday and I hadn’t tried to image since Memorial Day weekend and I had a new hand controller I was itching to try so I set up scope in the backyard and shot Jupiter. The seeing wasn’t as good as I hoped, it never is, but I managed to get this shot. The smudge in the upper right is Callisto which will be transiting Jupiter shortly. Despite the seeing I was able to get some detail. Mars and Saturn will be up later but I can’t see them from my backyard so they can wait. Maybe Friday.
Regarding the hand controller, some of you may remember my scope has had pointing problems for a while. After an alignment it would get way off. It would usually track okay but goto sucked when it acted up. I thought maybe if I updated the firmware that would help. I contacted Celestron for their opinion because they are the experts. The guy I talked to thought otherwise and felt I might need to send the mount in. “What do they know?” I thought. I bought the cables and connectors needed to update the firmware and was able to do that and it seemed to help a lot. But then at that last imaging session it started all over. So I threw the dice and gambled $100 that it was still the controller and bought a new one. Tonight I set up, I couldn’t see Polaris so I got it level and lined the mount up with where the compass in my phone said north was and entered the time and location and did a one point solar system alignment. Jupiter. Even with the lazy alignment it slewed to within a half a degree of the target. I centered and aligned and it tracked really well for the next hour till I turned it off. Drift shows up really well when imaging at f/10. Yay!
