Fremont Peak Saturday 5/21

by Bill Drelling

Saturday night was completely cloudless at FP. I arrived shortly before sunset and set up my Orion 120ST and Meade DSI Pro. Even though the moon was near full, I decided to go to the Peak just to get out and observe a little w/o the LX200GPS. The only other folks that were there were a few campers that wandered up around 1 AM just to see what I was doing--they must have seen the glow from my laptop screen.

This was first light for my new DSI Pro as well as my first time taking a ccd image, so the moon seemed like easy target. Even using the 120st with a FL of 600mm, the moon was too big for the ccd chip. I ended up havng to take a mosaic of 4 frames in each color just to capture the entire moon--now I have to paste each of the 4 images per color into one large frame, then merge all three colors into one tri-color image (which of course will look black and white since it is the moon). That meant a total of 12 images. 4 green, 4 red, and 4 blue. Since the DSI works a lot like a webcam on bright objects, I let each frame run for a little while as it tracked and stacked the images. I still have to figure out how to use the image processing software that came with the camera, so the image isn't ready to post yet. Once I figure that out I'll post a link here. What was interesting, though, was that best images came out using the green filter. The blue filtered images look ver y soft for some reason.

After playing with the camera for most of the night, I pulled out my Lunar 100 Card and started to identify various craters on the moon. I've never done that before and it was actually kind of fun. I also spent some time looking for a few other objects. Then, at around 3:30 AM or so I watched as the moon set behind the summit of Fremont Peak. It was actually very interesting to look at the moon through a telescope as it sank behind the summit, passing rocks and other objects on its way down.

In the morning I drove down the mountain and decided to stop in San Juan Baptista for breakfast. Turns out they were having a classic car show. The streets were blocked off and there were dozens of cherried out cars from the 50's and 60's with a few older ones as well. It was very cool. After looking at the cars for a while, I stopped for breakfast, then headed home.

It was a great night and gave me a needed shot in the arm. I've been experiencing a lot of "astro-stress" since moving out here. The clouds have been pretty bad, so even observing on a near full moon night alone was still a lot of fun.

I'll post my moon pic when I get it done. Don't expect much for a first ever CCD image.

Posted on sf-bay-tac May 23, 2005 19:07:17 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Sep 20, 2005 13:20:56 PT