Vixen Sphinx

So Green Witch had a Vixen Sphinx mount on sale for something like half price. It was a display model, so it's not in fantastic nick, but it all works and it had the polar alignment scope already fitted. (That doesn't come as standard.) So I phoned up and got it last week and have been waiting for a decent sized break in the clouds since.



Last night I got that break.

I couldn't see Polaris for alignment because there was a large bank of cloud permanently hiding it. I don't know enough about clouds to know what was going on, but while other clouds were moving about quite quickly, this one sat there for about 2 hours.

Roughly aligning it then using the software alignment stuff for the goto seemed to work fairly well, if not perfectly, so I could tell it to point at something and it'd go and find it. The next thing to do was to try and take some photos. I tried some projection photography of Jupiter, but the seeing was pretty crap and I'm limited to a set of very cheap eyepieces because my decent ones are too big to fit in the adapter. The photos of Jupiter really didn't come out well at all, so I gave up and turned my attention to Andromeda.

I pointed it at the galaxy and tried various different settings. I found that the tracking was slightly off so two minute exposures had some pretty bad trails. At 30 seconds the stars were, at full zoom on the camera, slightly off round, but not enough to be a problem, so I took 9 photos at 30 seconds each at prime focus on my telescope. I stuck them together with Deep Sky Stacker and here's the result:



You can just make out the first dark ring round the bright centre and M32 is visible too. I'm fairly chuffed with that given that it was my first try and the mount wasn't aligned. The bright skies round here don't help either, especially in summer when at least one part of the night sky is light blue at any given time.

Jupiter

Jupiter
Originally uploaded by Flxzr

Late last night I noticed that there were a few breaks in the clouds so I headed out with the camera to see what I could do. Low in the southern sky was Jupiter so I wapped my 200mm manual lens on the camera and took a few shots. I was kind of surprised how well it came out, I believe you can see 3 of the moons to the right of Jupiter itself.

Next time I'll have to take out the telescope as I've not seen Jupiter through it yet.

Saturn

So tonight there was some clear sky when I got home and Saturn was out. With some arsing around I got a couple of not-very-good photos. The one above was taken handheld, pointing the camera down my 3.2mm eyepiece. I had to whap a rather heavy gaussian blur on it to remove some of the noise.

The picture below was taken at prime focus. Not a lot to say about it except that Saturn couldn't have been more than about 10 pixels across in the final image.

Halo!

There haven't been many nice nights recently, and on the couple there have been I've not really done much stargazing. Anyway, tonight I got home and looked up at the moon and saw this:



In case you don't see it at first, there's a nice circle round the moon.

A Mars a Day Helps You Work, Rest and Play

Last night (Christmas Eve (I realise it's technically Boxing Day now, but who cares)) it was quite clear so I dragged my stuff out into the back garden and pointed the telescope at the moon, which was sitting just above the house. I didn't manage to take any really good shots of it, certainly none that are significantly better than those in my last post, so I turned my attention to Mars, which is sitting quite close to the moon at the moment.



It's not great, but then I was trying projection photography through my crappy eyepieces and, considering how small it is, and how difficult it was to focus, it seems far more successful than my attempts on the moon. I notice that the top left is white and the bottom right is red, I suspect that's chromatic aberration in action as the three channels all look slightly out of alignment in the Gimp. I can't work out how to move colour channels independently of each other in it, though.

I got a couple of Burgess Planetary eyepieces for Christmas! It's actually clear tonight, but very hazy looking, so I figured it wasn't worth trying them out. I did point them at a hill earlier, just to make sure they seemed ok, and could see a cow. One of them had two big black blobs which looked awfully like chips in the lenses. I couldn't see anything on the lenses so I was stumped and worried I would have to send them back. Then I noticed that they come apart and you can access the lenses on the inside and what do you know? Big black lumps of something on the inside lens. Two seconds with a blower and it was sorted.

More Moon

Last night it was FREEZING, but the sky was relatively clear, so I popped out with my telescope and took a few photos from the back garden.



I got a fairly decent one of the moon, but the seeing wasn't too good, so when I tried to do a bit of projection photography it came out rather wobbly. Also my eyepieces suck, so that won't help.



I tried pointing at a random star and seeing what I could get. I managed to catch the trail of something flying over, I suspect it's just a plane, high in the sky.

Orion!

So last night I was out at the cinema and when I got back I realised that the sky had cleared up and Orion was well above the houses across the road. I hadn't had a chance to look at Orion through my telescope yet so I broke it out and set it up in the front garden. Unfortunately it was a full moon, so that probably made the sky brighter. Anyway, I tried to take a photo of the Orion Nebula (M42) through my telescope and this is the result:



Not that great, but you CAN make the nebula out. As always it wasn't a particularly long exposure, because of my lack of a tracking mount.

I also had a look at Mars, but even with my smallest eyepiece it was a tiny wee disc. It was noticeably red, but also had a strong white tinge to it, I'm not sure if that means I need to use a filter or something on it...