Ad Astra Observatory

I had a few small tweaks to do, and I was ready to roll with Trixie 2011.

I focused the camera on the moon; this involved no small amount of gymnastics, as the 10 day moon was just past zenith.
I then aligned the finder, and was able to point the scope at M42, where I found that I needed to tweak the collimation.

So I tweaked the collimation, requiring me to realign the finder and refocus the camera.

With that complete, I decided to try to shoot some M42. That went… meh. It was pretty cloudy, and Orion was low enough that I was getting light reflecting off the observatory, not to mention a bright moon nearby (just east of Gemini). Trixie’s debut as a DSO scope will have to wait for a nicer night.

I shot some action photos of the scope and mount (I’ll post those later), and was about to shut down in defeat, but decided that I’d give the moon a try, even through all the clouds. I shot 50 subframes, each 1/1000th sec, at ISO 200 (that’s about as short of an exposure as the DSLR will do in MaxIM). I daresay I had some success.

Click for a larger image.

Nice.

Everything could use a little tightening and tweaking; collimation, finder alignment, motor focuser, balance. But I can officially call Trixie a lunagraph (I have yet to be impressed with her performance on stars 🙂 )!