by Richard Crisp
No, I've not fallen off the face of the Earth, nor did the terrorists get me, I've just been too busy lately to have fun with you folks out at the usual hangouts. But on Saturday night I was in the Mountain Ranch area of the Sierra, not too far out of San Andreas and Angel's Camp. After having spent part of the afternoon at the Concours d'Elegance at the Ironwood Winery in Murphy's, I planned to do a fair amount of imaging in the dark sky area out there.
The afternoon sky was showing lots of clouds and I was feeling that I was about to get skunked, but as the sun went down, the clouds cleared up and the sky was good. The seeing was steady, little twinkling observed. There were occasional wisps of clouds that looked a little bit like the Milky Way in terms of the relative prominence of the clouds versus the MW. The temperature was warm enough to permit shorts and shirtsleeves until I quit at 2:30am.
The site is on property owned by friends of ours; my wife and I being invited up to escape the pressure cooker for a weekend and hopefully some take in some decent observing.
I was awfully tired from a full-day's worth of activites including the framing of a workshed (sort of like a barn-raising), so I only imaged a couple of objects, M27 and M42.
I had been planning to do a straight LRGB M27 image for a while to go along with the one I did in August which was shot using Narrowband Spectal filters (Ha, Hb, O3). So now I have it done and uploaded to my Yahoo Briefcase.
To see the LRGB image and to see the False Color one shot through the narrowband filters, you can click the following links:
True Color image (from 22 Sept)
False Color image (From 24 Aug)
I am still not happy with my M42 image, so I'll not upload this one..
And just before shutting everything down for the night, I also did a bit of eyepiece observing of Saturn. It really was nice, and I'd have liked to spend an hour or so observing it like Jim Feldhouse did recently, but bed was calling and I needed a long-overdue rest....
