Ad Astra Observatory

On the second night of camping, I decided to mount Pumpkin, to make things a little easier on myself. The wider field made framing a lot easier, although focusing was a challenge with the tiny star images and my imprecisely-cut Bahtinov mask.

The wind had died down, which meant more bugs, but much steadier seeing. The mount was pulling off 0.5″ RMS, twice as good as the previous night. Pumpkin shoots at 4″/px, though, so either night would have been fine.

I did notice that the battery bank was acting a little more sluggish on night #2. It still ran the rig all night, but turning on the dew controller rebooted the mount, and everything was a little more prone to power surges on the somewhat-discharged battery. I had not been stingy with battery power during the day, either. I had charged up both mobile phones, and even attempted to process my images with the computer plugged in. I was purposely giving the batteries a nice rough workout. When I got them home, the battery meter read 65%, so I probably could have gone a third night, in a pinch.

The 350D had dead batteries, and no way to recharge them (a purposeful oversight; I will be running the 350D on AC from now on, so I wasn’t really concerned about it), so I didn’t do any tripod work the second night. The dead batteries also kept me from downloading the previous night’s work, so I didn’t realize until I got home that all of the hubcap shots had been blurry. Bummer.

My old nemesis, NGC7000, is becoming a new favorite when I’m shooting with Pumpkin. I set up for a night of Ha. In retrospect, I should have shot RGB from the dark sky site, but I didn’t, so there you go. This weekend was mostly to test out the battery rig, to see whether I could go off the grid, and at that I was completely successful. The batteries brought the rig through two very full nights of shooting, they were driving the mount (and computer, camera, etc) from 10pm until 5am both nights.

It was a splendid trip all around.