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Salisbury Star Party 2010 |
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Written by Richie Jarvis
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Monday, 16 August 2010 19:52 |
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This year saw another wonderful Salisbury Star Party in Sixpenny Handley in Wiltshire. Wednesday was a great start. It took about 2 hours to get there from East Sussex, so I was there just before dark. Many thanks to Iain, Neil and Stephen for putting the tent up whilst I got the imaging kit up and running :)
The first target was Messier 8 - the Lagoon Nebula in Sagittarius. I was able to spend an hour on this in the end, and am very happy with the results so far. I wish I had more data to be honest, but I think it passed muster! Its not a target I can shoot from my observatory though, so Salisbury is my best option.
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Written by Richie Jarvis
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Thursday, 22 July 2010 01:29 |
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Tonight in the observatory has been a real lesson to me. When I first setup the observatory, I put a steel pier in, and levelled it thoroughly. Unfortunately, over the last 2 years, it has shifted, and I have been having increasing problems with accurate tracking.
Once I realised what the problem was, I re-levelled the pier and mount, rebalanced and drift-aligned using the excellent WCS software. If you haven't used it - give it a try - it just requires a webcam and you can accurately drift align your mount within about 30 minutes.
Anyway, the good news is that it worked. The bad news is that I experienced a blue-screen of death right afterwards, and it corrupted my EQMOD configuration file. The behaviour was very strange - EQMOD would reach a particular area of the sky (around my target annoyingly - how did it know??!) in Cygnus, and would then convince itself that it was in the southern hemisphere. Most strange. It took around 2 hours to troubleshoot that problem!
I did manage to get a few more Sii subs for my NGC6888 Crescent Nebula - here is the result so far:
Full version and capture details available here |
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Friday, 21 May 2010 20:47 |
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I've been testing a Vixen VC200L recently for a review. Vixen Opticron have been very supportive, and have helped me immensely by providing just the right kit to hookup my SXV-H9 to the Vixen.
I am also using a focal reducer, which reduces the scope from its native F/9 to F/6.3. With this setup, the scope is performing very well, and giving well resolved and crisp images.
I did have a bit of a problem initially with Polar Misalignment, which caused star trailing over long sub-exposures. Anything over 5 minutes was giving nasty trailing, which made things rather challenging! I've now solved the problem by drift aligning the mount with WCS, and am able to run 20 minute subs. I think the drift alignment could definitely be improved, but that will have to wait until after I've done the Observatory roof!
Here is a recent shot taken at the beginning of the month over 3 nights of Messier 51 the Whirlpool Galaxy. You can see the full sized version, with the image capture details here
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