Ad Astra Observatory

I’m testing out the new C9.25 tonight. Last night, I’m writing off as a “configuration” night.

The sky is a little cloudy tonight, high thin clouds that serve to brighten up an otherwise OK subframe.

One thing that I’ve noticed, though, is that my 5min subframes are all saturating. This is a mixture of a couple of things. First of all, I lost my white balance reference image (I thought it might be interfering with the “raw”ness of the RAW images). I need to re-shoot that the next sunny day we get.

More important, however, I left the MPCC (not important) and the IDAS-LPS filter (very important) on Veronica.

So all the images are bright red (can be fixed in PS) and saturating with skyglow (oops).

There are a lot of variables that need to be correct in order to get a good image. I tend to run into problems with forgetting things as it is, so the more variables that can be thought of as “fixed”, the better. This is a good thing, because it means that I can forget about 75% of the variables from night to night. But when a new piece of equipment comes along, I have to do a lot of testing before I can recall which pieces and parts need to be paid attention to in the new setup.

For instance, the reason I left the MPCC behind is that my understanding is that SCTs don’t exhibit a lot of coma, so it might be counter productive. But the IDAS LPS is sitting at the end of the MPCC. Oops.

Other than being red and saturated, the images look nice. M51 covers a lot more of the frame than it did before. I can still place it in the frame vertically with a lot of empty space around it, so the C9.25 will only get me so far into the tiny galaxies. But I am going to try to put together a side-by-side comparison of M51 from various scopes to see how much the magnification is changing things.

still having problem with the ST-4 not wanting to calibrate in Dec. Might be the near-zenith position, might be the floppy focuser, I don’t know what. It’s just annoying.

BTW, as I type, I’m on the Ubuntu 12” laptop, VNCd into the 15” XP laptop in the observatory. I’m also Skyping on the 9” OSX laptop, which is VNCd into the Mac server. It’s all quite geeky. I. Love. It.