In the observatory in San Diego

by Paul LeFevre

We had temps in the 80's and 90's from Wednesday on (and continuing today), nights in the 70's. Clear, dry, and calm. I am horribly sleep-deprived, having spent most of every night since Wednesday out in the observatory, which is now up and running, shooting pictures like a madman. Even down here in Sunny SoCal it's rare to get such good conditions several nights in a row *AND* around a new moon...so it was worth every wink of sleep missed.

Last night the seeing was exceptionally good -- sub-arcsec. While I'm in the same laminar flow as Palomar Mountain which results in awfully good average seeing, last night was truly outstanding.

Here are a couple of quick-processed images from last night of the Rosette Nebula: http://www.lefevre.darkhorizons.org/rose112006p1l.jpg
(medium size, 308k)
http://www.lefevre.darkhorizons.org/rose112006p1s.jpg
(small size, 130k)

(TeleVue NP-101, StarlightXpress SXV-M25C camera, 6-minute subframes unguided on an AP900GTO mount)

Keep in mind that the image above is 12 minutes out of over 3 hours of exposure time I have, and still needs lots of work, color balancing, etc. for the final image -- I'm teetering between catching up on sleep or processing images, though I suspect the latter will win out, since I have over 4GB of data acquired over the past 5 nights :)

And yeah, I even observed a little visually while all the imaging was going on -- both through the scopes and with my 10x50 binocs. Anybody gets tired of that NorCal jetstream is welcome to come on down and visit anytime this winter ;-)

Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 20, 2006 08:58:34 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Dec 13, 2006 21:37:33 PT