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.

Comets and Galaxies and Frostbite, oh my!

So today the sky was nice and clear so I headed up to Glen Fruin to see if I could find a decent spot there. I found a gate to a field with plenty of space and planted myself there and then proceeded to freeze to the ground. The wind was so cold! The wind was also incredibly strong, so most of my photos are a wee bit odd looking due to the camera moving.

Anyway, I managed to find the comet 17p Holmes and got a shot of it.



I also pointed my camera at Andromeda (M31) but since it's so faint and I don't have an equatorial mount for my camera, the exposure time's quite short and you can't make Andromeda out too well.



See it up there, the biggest blur?

After I decided my hands were too frozen to stay there any longer I headed down to Duck Bay Marina and took some photos down there. Mostly just of the lights I could see across the loch, but I got a nice one of Ursa Major.