Hurricane Wilma scraped by us to the south yesterday. The good news is it would seem I was just out of her reach. We got very little wind and rain to speak of. Yesterday afternoon after the storm had cleared, the sky became a cloudless blue and the temperature dropped 20 degrees into the 60s… amazing. With the low humidity, cool temperature and clear skies it was “scopin’ time!”

I hadn’t had the scope out since May 20th (according to the Autostar controller) so it took me a while to get set up and oriented. The one thing I REALLY noticed now is that my clock drive has ALOT of slop and my focus is jerky at very fine adjustments. Perhaps when I can afford it I’ll have the whole thing supercharged. This service is praised by the leading ETX expert Mike Weasner. At any rate, once I had my target centered, the scope tracked fairly well and it was almost 10 minutes before I started to notice any drift.

My initial intention was just to observe Mars and call it a night as I had gotten a late start. Even at 276X, Mars was a nearly featureless pale pink disk… rather unimpressive. So I broke out my iBook G4 and the Meade Lunar Planetary Imager (LPI) and did half a dozen runs at varying exposures. The processed results came out a bit better than I expected.

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Even for nearly “ideal” viewing conditions locally, the was STILL alot of atmospheric turbulence. 🙁

Until next time!

Since the seeing has been so poor lately and the moon is not rising until after midnight, I thought I’d fool a little with re-processing some of my older images now that I’ve had a bit more experience with it.

Below is an image of Jupiter from my observation run with the Meade LPI on May 6th. I used Lynkeos for the stacking in this instance (see the Software sidebar to the right) averaging about 100 frames. I did some post tweaking in Adobe Photoshop. If you compare this to my earlier image processing attempt (Jupiter Tonight) for this run, you will see I was able to tease out much more contrast and detail here. You will also see I mislabeled the moons in my earlier work as well! DOH!

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I went out this evening at dusk to fool with the ScopeTronix 40mm eyepiece. The Moon was waxing crescent about 4.4 days old. I went out at early dusk because it was due to set at 12:29 AM and was already into the west — about 40° above the horizon. I took some shots in different zoom and Barlow configurations just to see what I could come up with and even threw on the Moon filter towards the end for good measure.

I really like this eyepiece! It has a great FOV with the camera. I think the batteries in scope were dying though, as I could hear the focus motor straining and the slew controls became sluggish and unresponsive (Oh will I ever achieve perfect alignment?). So I don’t think it was tracking properly. I have the power supply so I guess next time I go out I’ll need to run an extension cord.

I should really remember to horizontally flip these BEFORE annotating them… anyway, here they are.

I’m going to call 050512_016 the “money shot” for the evening. 🙂

I combined two of the images above using Photoshop, to create this extra wide view.

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On a different note, I had the good sense tonight to think about what I was going to do BEFORE I went out. So instead of taking out the full kit of everything I own and fumbling in the dark with packaging and whatnot, I had it all prepared in a mini gear kit. I even got the idea to clip the mini Maglite on the visor of my baseball cap! Not only could I see what I was doing, I had both hands free and no mosquitos flying into my mouth.