Ad Astra Observatory

The Jr. Astronomer decided to call it a night early, but her cousin, L_, was staying the night, and he wanted to learn about the sky, so we stayed up real late and pulled out all the stops.

We had Kelly out, and looked at Jupiter. Then I decided to dust off Trixie’s Dobsonian base, and put on her altitude bearings. It’s been awhile since I tried that, so I should probably have done it in the daytime when there’s more light, but we had fun anyway. Getting Jupiter into view without a finder turned out to be a boondoggle, so we stole Kelly’s finder to use on Trixie. I always seem to be short a finderscope. To Astromart! 🙂 Jupiter is so bright in Trixie that you can see diffraction spikes. 😮 What a scope. I am really looking forward to cruising the sky with her.

I’ve been trying to get my planetary photography rig going again, too, So I tried out the venerable NexImage (which I finally got working in a new-to-me piece of capture software called FireCapture), but couldn’t get it quite running in either Kelly or Trixie, so I pulled out the brand-new-just-got-it-today, hope-it-will-be-a-good-run planet cam, a ZWO ASI120MC. This seems to be the New Hotness for planetary; I saw at least one claim that FireCapture could drive it at over 200fps 😮

We played with getting the ZWO focused, but with one thing and another, wobbly dob mount, poorly aligned finder, new software, new camera, and of course Earth rotating so fast that Jupiter whizzed through the FOV in about 15 seconds… I got close, but I’m both rusty and in need of a more stable gear situation before I can really start working the planets again. I’ll be back, though — Jupiter is well-placed, and even the little I saw leaves me thinking the ZWO is going to be a winner. Very short backfocus requirement, which is awesome.

Meanwhile, Cassie was just humming away for the evening, doing another 4-hour run on an old favorite, M51, who I would hope needs no introduction. Interestingly enough, I lost the 12th subframe because the guider went past the shutter. M51 is actually east of M101 (meaning it should have had more time before hitting zenith, not less), but for some reason, the geometry worked out better the previous evening, or perhaps I was just too tired to grok.

In any case, it is a gorgeous image, lots of data, and I’m glad I got to share my observatory with a willing assistant. Thanks, L_! Come back anytime.