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online star chart

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http://bavard.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/

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Solar System Photography

Moon at 10 days

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Moon at 10 days old. First light for new Opteka 500mm f/8 mirror lens. Focus needs work.

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

M45, The Pleiades Cluster in Taurus

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M45, The Pleiades, Open Cluster/Reflection Nebula in Taurus Finally got back around to some of the winter objects. Picked up some decent nebulosity.

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

NGC 2237, The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros

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An example of serendipity. I was trying to find this nebula, was using GOTO (on the CG-5GT), couldn’t be sure I had it, so I only shot one frame of it. Turns […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

M81 and M82, Spiral Galaxies in Ursa Major

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Another try at this pair. Starting to get some detail on the spiral arms on M81. More magnification wouldn’t hurt; I have plenty of FOV to spare (this was cropped by about […]

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Deep Sky / Gear / Long Exposure Photography

M42, The Great Orion Nebula

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Never thought it would take this long to get back to M42… This was my original attempt, a stack of ten 2min subframes. Here’s the image with some more data added (details […]

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Deep Sky / Long Exposure Photography

M81 and M82, Spiral Galaxies in Ursa Major

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M81 and M82, Galaxies in Ursa Major Edge-on galaxy (Cigar-shaped) M82 and neighbor M81. First shots in awhile. Got some good weather all the way through December and into January, finally took […]

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Techniques

Polar Alignment Calculations

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Here’s a page that derives Polar Alignment Calculations. (update 5/2020: the original site is gone, so I found the text on Wayback and am inserting it below. This is by the original […]

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Gear / Observatory / Telescope

Special Guest Star takes the mount at Hilltop O

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The Astro Jedi needed somewhere to store his light sab—- I mean, bucket, and I was only too happy to accommodate him. I have decided that I need to come to a […]

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General / Maintenance / Observatory

Dome shutter is motorized again!

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I finally decided to bite the bullet and fix the shutter motor. Things went sideways last winter, and I’ve been opening the shutter manually (and tying it shut with rope, so we […]

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ATM

Trixie 2017 – tube mods

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I finally got around to cutting the MTA-UTA tubes to length; the only eyepiece that would come to focus with the focuser spacer in place is the Televue 55mm Plossl. If I […]

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