Ad Astra Observatory

I only have a few more things I can try before I have to give up on Veronica as an imaging scope on The Lemon-i.

Tonight, I added a 2.8x “Klee” Barlow lens to the guidescope, in the hope that more guiding magnification would solve the oscillation problem. Pumpkin refocused with no problem with the new lens in place; Pumpkin’s effective focal length is now longer than Veronica’s (400mm * 2.8x = 1120mm). This changes the guidescope resolution from 7”/px down to 2.5”/px, which is still a lot more than Veronica’s 1.6”/px, but as always, I figure subpixel guiding should help.

…

It didn’t.

I also decided to cut the exposure length down to 10m from 20m, figuring that the mount might be able to keep up. So I tried out an hour of photos at 10m each (6 frames, for the math dropouts). All 6 were great. So, buoyed by the apparent success of the better guiding, I decided to shoot an hour of 20m frames (…3), followed by doing the rest of the night at 10m, in case the 20m set didn’t work out.

I bet you can see where I’m going with this.

Yep, the initial hour of shots is all I got. All 3 of the 20m frames were trailed, and so were all 20 of the “second set” of 10m frames. I should have known.

I was Seriously. Bummed. Out. Man.

Just like sometimes a chunk of gum will make an interesting pattern on your shoe, here’s what I scraped off the cutting room floor from Thursday night’s shoot:

NGC 6820 in Cygnus

NGC 6820 is one of those “second tier” nebulae that doesn’t get a lot of press, but has some nice pretty detail. Because this is only an hour of integration, it’s a bit noisier and dimmer than I’d like, but I captured it.

Veronica has great potential as an astrograph, but I’m losing patience with fighting to keep a heavy scope working right.

It has occurred to me that, before I tried shooting in Ha, the longest subframe I had even tried is 5m, because the skyglow would eat me for lunch if I went any longer. So I am in uncharted territory with these 20m images, but still. It’s not like this is an insanely heavy rig. This *should* work!

sigh. I’ll try this just one more time, then I’m going to swap back to Pumpkin.