by Jeff Kirk
The breeze died down around 8:30, leading me to think the viewing would be reasonably good. I set up my LX90 with the dew shield (more to prevent stray light from entering the mirror from nearby streetlights than for any concern about dew). The night was warm and pleasant. The sky was completely clear.
After polar aligning my scope, I thought I'd try to find a glob to gauge the clarity of the air. M11 was visible but undistinguished in the 40mm Plössl. I spotted a couple of others, but my current favorites were all obscured by moonlight (wouldn't you know they'd have to be in Sagittarius and Scorpius?). I promptly gave up on stars and focused on the moon, taking care to set the tracking rate on the Autostar to "Lunar". (As a novice, I still have to remind myself of this with great deliberation.)
The moon was brilliant, of course, and the seeing was much stabler than I was expecting. The smoke from the Oregonian fires had mostly cleared away, and the disc was not nearly as discolored as it has been in recent days.
I use a Scopetronix Digiadapt afocal coupler to attach my Nikon Coolpix 990 digital camera to my scope. This adapter works quite well, but it is just barely capable of holding the Orion 40mm Plössl eyepiece I use for my "widefield" images. I put widefield in quotes because the FOV with this eyepiece can't be more than two degrees. Still, it's wide enough for the moon, which is about the only thing I can reliably photograph with the Coolpix. As nice a camera as it is, it is very poorly suited to anything but the moon and the brighter planets. However, with the addition of a new JMI NGF-S microfocuser, I was able to nail down some extremely sharp pictures.
I think I took something like 34 exposures with three different eyepieces: a 40mm Plössl, a 25mm Plössl, and a new 10mm Lanthanum eyepiece I recently purchased from Orion. I posted three of these images on my website, if you care to look: http://www.munitions.com/~jeff/astrophyles/lx90pix.html
The detail in the images is startling (at least, it was to me) because the viewing conditions were quite good. (I guess the quality of the scope is also quite good! These are the best images I've captured so far.) The photos were very slightly processed in Photoshop to increase contrast and brightness, with a single iteration of the "Sharpen" filter applied to the final image to bring out the edge detail a bit more.
I also took a roll of Ektachrome 400 slides through a Lumicon T adapter with my Minolta Maxxum 7. I cannot recommend this camera enough for anyone who wants to take astrophotos. The camera has a large LCD display on the back for displaying status information, and can display warning messages when it detects something has gone awry. There is a "lens lock" feature which prevents the camera from taking pictures when no lens is attached. The Lumicon camera adapter does not contain the requisite autofocus circuitry to convince the camera that a lens is attached, and it warned me that I would need to change Custom Setting 16 to defeat the automatic lens lock. Fantastic! Once I did this, I was able to snap away with abandon. More importantly the camera has an SLR mirror lock feature. If you choose a 2 second timer delay for the exposure, the SLR mirror swings out of the light path and the shutter clicks two seconds later, allowing any vibration introduced by the SLR mirror movement to dampen away.
Conveniently, the moon's image on the focusing screen consumed almost exactly the entire vertical field of view. Hopefully the clarity of the air will produce some spectacular slides. It was a bit difficult to focus precisely, given the on-axis orientation of the camera, and I do not yet have a diagonal viewer or a diffuse ground glass focusing screen for the Maxxum 7. The microfocuser is of limited utility when you can't really tell whether the image is in focus. The LCD panel on the Nikon Coolpix eliminates this ambiguity, but again, it's only suitable for bright objects with distinct detail.
After my photo session, I thought I'd track down Uranus and Neptune, which are both near opposition. I was pleased to be able to spot them both in spite of the moon's glare. It was the first time this novice astrophile had seen these planets "in the flesh", so to speak. I was able to just make out the disc of Uranus with the 10mm Lanthanum eyepiece. Fantastic!
All in all, considering the crappy location and light pollution, it was a very nice night of observing.