Although I was too tired to drive any distance on Friday night, it was impossible to stay inside, especially with my new CCD camera begging to eat photons. So I set up my FC100 on the sidewalk and worked with the outfit - MX916 camera, GM100 mount, FC100 imaging scope, guidescope, ST4, laptop, dew straps - for several hours. I'm rapidly learning the focus idiosyncrasies of the outfit as well as some gotchas. For instance, I recently upgraded my ST4 from a very old ROM to the latest, and found that I had to use new settings on a few parameters or else the tracking wasn't good (the high-res image on my website suffers from this).
One image came out well (M65 & M66); the other two are mildly interesting. The high-res image shows the great promise of this particular CCD camera, but also the decreased light sensitivity (1/4 of the low-res mode) and increased sensitivity to tracking errors. These "second light" images, along with the original two from the previous week, can be seen at:
http://members.home.com/psterngold/ccd/imageframeset.html
Next step: imaging with my C11. I'm licking my chops.
Cheers,
Paul Sterngold
PS - Yes, Richard has been teasing me, but only because a Messier Imaging
Marathon is such a tempting thing to try!