Ad Astra Observatory

The second night out with Cassie was only slightly less frustrating than the first.

I don’t know whether there was a slight drop in the seeing or what, but when I really needed the guider to start ripping down those 0.25″ RMS numbers that I know it can do, I was suddenly getting 1.1″ guiding. Which would not have been a problem with Pumpkin on top (which shoots at 4″/px or something equally disgusting), but Cassie shoots at 0.6″/px, so I ended up with trailed or blobby stars. Again.

I got so disgusted that I set up on a straightforward object and just left it running for the night. I was in bed by midnight or so.

Things had cleared out a lot by the final night. The website was not all that clear about which nights were really part of the star party, so a lot of people left after 3 nights. I spent a little time wandering around. Dave B. (who I know from the Chabot Mirror Workshop) was annotating his Uranometria as he was working on searching down the last few NGC galaxies. There really are a lot of different ways to approach this hobby. (:

I started the night during twilight, shooting some widefield of the moon and the “observatory”.
I lined up the mount on Antares as soon as darkness fell, so that I could make another attempt at B27, this time with the mount aligned with the OTA pointing east instead of west.

The seeing was very jittery down near the horizon, and I was not entirely sure of my pointing accuracy. So I only shot one frame of B27. When it came out with badly trailed stars, I moved on.

I think that my polar alignment could have used some refinement. Also, I bumped the mount at least once while trying to move the battery bank around. I had also slammed my head into the telescope earlier in the evening (I am currently sporting a large knot on my head as proof), but I didn’t want to waste a bunch of time on polar alignment, so I just went with it. Turns out that after all that, I was still pretty close. I slewed the scope from near Antares to Sadr to move from B27 to my next target (NGC6888), and was only off by a very small amount in the finder. Nice. Still, ouch. But nice. Very solid mount.

The next target was the Crescent Nebula, NGC 6888. I have fought this object at all focal lengths longer than Pumpkin. I worked this one for an hour, then moved on, intending to do several more objects on this night, as I had on the previous.

I admit I was pretty tired. Four straight nights of staying up late and then sleeping on the ground will take it out of you, no matter how cushy the tent accommodations are. So when the stars came out a little blobby on NGC6888, I decided that my next object was going to be the last one of the star party.

I thought about it for awhile, and settled on another object that’s difficult from my backyard, NGC7293, The Helix Nebula in Aquarius. This is the largest and closest planetary nebula to Earth (if there’s a larger one in the Southern Hemisphere, I apologize). But it never gets very high from my latitude, and with the observatory walls, roof, and That Palm Tree conspiring to make life below 0deg Dec difficult, I just haven’t shot it much.

It had just barely cleared the horizon when I slewed. I knew this would make the seeing sketchy. But I was tired and irritated at the SCT and my head hurt and I was basically done. So I ended up getting 4 hours of this object! w00t!

I also decided to drag out the hubcap and work some all-sky images. I had a very strange hardware failure; the 2.5mm plug for The Gizmo Neue had become detached from the rest of the plug. I thought about it for awhile, but had no spare. So I was limited to either manually holding the remote release button (which I did for a half hour or so), or 30sec images, which is the longest you can do without a cable release. Once my patience ran out on holding the button, I reverted to the 30sec thing. I set up the Mac to take a 30sec image every 3 minutes, and left it running all night. In the morning, the Mac’s batteries had died (first time for that!), so I am not sure how many of these I got. I’ll process them and get the results posted.

I know that it sounds like I had a tough night. Let me say this. The seeing was eh, ok. The heat and wind during the day were something I could have lived without. Overall, the star party was awesome. The skies were dark, dark. And the rig worked really well, pretty much as well as it does when I’m in the backyard.