by Jeff Kirk
I hurriedly set up the scope in the neighbor's driveway (the house is under construction and is a little further from the Atomic Death Light attached to our garage). After a quick "easy alignment" against Procyon and Dubhe I was in business. First target: the Great Orion Nebula, of course. The sky was amazingly clear, and I could detect no sky glow with my completely unadapted eyes.
I spent a bit of time admiring the fact that I could see the nebula at all. But it was impossible to make out detail very well with all of the incident light from my hated, hated neighbors' houses. And the infinite stream of cars that insisted on driving by my house. "We hates them forever, precious!"
I quickly moved on to Saturn, which was very close to zenith. The planet was glorious last night. It was still and pristine in the 20mm Panoptic. Boy, I sure like that lens. Then I pushed the magnification up to 285x with my 7mm Nagler Type 6, but it was too much for the atmospheric conditions (and my probably not entirely cooled-down scope), so I backed out to the 13mm Nagler. I could easily spot several moons, Titan most prominently, of course. This was the first time I'd had a chance to see Saturn at opposition. Amazing! The yellow band around the equator was extremely clear. The Cassini division was razor-sharp. Such a beautiful jewel in the sky.
Before I packed it in (I have to get up too damned early in the AM to stay up late), I hooked up the Lumicon Easy Guider and connected my new Canon EOS 10D camera to the scope. All of my previous astro-photos were taken afocally through eyepieces with my Nikon Coolpix 990. One of the principal reasons I bought the 10D was being able to shoot at prime focus. I had a lot of trouble using my Minolta Maxxum 7 with the Easy Guider in the past, mostly because I couldn't focus it properly without a right-angle viewer. Ah ha, but now I have a right angle viewer! And it was much easier. Still, it's damned tricky to focus that gigantic telescope while peering through the viewer. I can hook my PowerBook up to the camera and use the image capture program to focus more accurately, I think. Might have to resort to that, but it was too much work for a quick shooting session last night.
I was able to get images of Saturn and the Orion Nebula at various ISO speed equivalencies and exposure durations. Boy, it sure doesn't take much of an exposure to over-expose Saturn! My first silly experiment was a 30 second shot. Saturn blazed like a miniature sun, all detail lost in the glare. I backed off to much shorter exposures, and got a few that actually looked like Saturn. Pretty fuzzy, though. Maybe using a webcam IS the way to go for planets.
I also took a number of long exposures of the Orion Nebula to see which ISO speeds worked best at which exposures. While I was able to get a fair amount of detail, at extreme ISO speeds (1600 and 3200) the sky glow started to come into play. I also began to notice streaking (an artifact of neglecting drift alignment and properly balancing the scope before I started shooting.
Nevertheless, I was very happy to get a chance to get out and do some stargazing and photography, mediocre though the results were. Here's hoping for a few more days of good weather!
Posted on sf-bay-tac Thu Jan 22 08:26:04 2004 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.0 Sun Jan 25 08:35:16 2004 PT