Ad Astra Observatory

I am spending the weekend camping at Coyote Lake, near Gilroy, CA. This is the second time I’ve been camping here, but the rig has changed significantly since last time. In fact, other than perhaps an eyepiece or two, I don’t think a single piece of equipment remains of that former setup (Wobble/ED80 on CG-5GT, shooting film, guided by the ST-4).

I set up a packing list spreadsheet. That helped a lot. I had no missing equipment, and things were even sorted more or less the way I wanted, so I always felt like I had the part I needed right at hand. Very nice.

The setup went quickly and easily with no major glitches. The battery bank ran the scope, WCS got my polar alignment done in an hour or so, and Cassie was focused using the Bahtinov mask in minutes. I even had a wifi network set up so that atom and cluster could do their normal VNC thing. It was all very homey.

While Cassie was shooting away, I used the 350D on a fixed tripod, shooting widefields of the sky and all-sky shots of the hubcap, etc. That was a little more rugged than I’m used to; I was running the camera with a battery and saving to a CF card, because I couldn’t get a computer hooked up correctly, and I didn’t have an AC adapter. It was still a lot of fun.

I am realizing that I have a lot of images to showcase, so I have put them all in separate posts.

The night was super windy. I honestly should have pulled Cassie and put up Pumpkin; the seeing wasn’t really there for high-magnification imaging, and I think Pumpkin would have been a lighter load in all that wind. But, so be it. I shot The Crescent Nebula for awhile, then switched to The Pacman Nebula before heading to bed at 4am.

The Milky Way was gorgeous. It’s amazing how many stars I can’t see from the backyard. There was a pretty bad light dome in the north from San Jose, but the south and east where I was shooting were really pretty nice. I could clearly see the North America Nebula, and the star clouds in Sagittarius and Cygnus were prominent.

I realized as I was going to bed that I had seen every Zodiac constellation except for Taurus during the night. Venus was just east of Gemini at sunset, and Aries rose over the eastern horizon before I went to sleep. Wow.

Rig went up quickly and efficiently, sky was clear and dark, and I had a freshly-charged battery running everything. In all, it was an excellent night.